Monday 03/09/07 Operator Please, Johnny Foreigner @ The Barfly, Cardiff

The Levi’s One To Watch Tour has grown in impressive stature over the years. Just eighteen months ago, two then relatively unknown bands, The Kooks and The Editors, shared the same pokey Barfly stage on a night which saw them become arena fodder and festival staples in a matter of months. Having played to packed out tents at The Reading and Leeds Festival last weekend, Australian genre-splicing poppers Operator Please are hoping for the same stratospheric success. The bands makeup is clearly one of pungent youth with ages ranging between a wholesome 16 to 19. Regardless of their youth, Operator Please have etched up some notable support slots with the likes of The Go! Team and The Arctic Monkeys, with both providing a sizable influence to the bands cut-and-paste song writing rhetoric.

Support came from Birmingham indie kids Johnny Foreigner. Despite the pitiful band name, Johnny Foreigner’s playful yet forceful approach to garage-rock was well executed - especially evident on the screeching ‘Suicide Pact Yeh’. There were moments of eye-widening experimentation, with set closer ‘Our Bipolar Friends’ cutting between saccharine pop and throbbing boy/girl vocal exchanges that set their sights on the likes of The Kills and Los Campesinos.

Operator Please sauntered onto the stage almost unnoticed until lead singer Amandah Wilkinson egged the crowd on into a handclapping frenzy during opener Get What You Want. Kohl-eyed and stuffed full of energy, Wilkinson is the uber-charged lynchpin that lifts her vocal styling from, most evidently, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O. Despite their tender years, the rest of the band is ridiculously accomplished with taut power-pop workouts that barely edge past the three-minute mark. The punk-pop jerkiness of Crash Tragic had Wilkinson cooing her best girl-group vocals whilst keyboard player Sarah Gardiner produced a swathe of eerie Hammer horror-esque hooks.

The brilliant ‘Just A Song About Ping Pong’ displayed Wilkinson’s ability to change vocal tack with a rap-skat intro that barely came up for breath, whilst other band members thrashed between each other to create an ebullient slice of adolescent garage-rock. Closer ‘Zero! Zero!’ Threw further genres into the musically youthful melting pot with Ashley McConnell’s fervent violin playing plundering heavily from New York gypsy-punks Gogol Bordello. With a highly-anticipated debut album set for release in November of this year, Operator Please look set to become another memorable benchmark on the Levi’s tour.