Making the Rounds

“Does it get warm there?” the Toronto native asks, his voice betraying a weary, besieged optimism, like a kid awaiting the results of a pop quiz that he knows he failed.

Sorry, dude, there’s no relief in Tulsa.

Not this time of year.

Rather than battle icy roads and spotty crowds in a cramped van that could double as a Frigidaire, a lot of smaller touring bands take the holidays off.

But not Huson’s group, hands-in-the-air electro rockers Hello Operator.

They’re slowly headed from the frosty climes of their native Canada to these sunny parts, city by city, hoping for a break from the cold as soon as possible, not that their luck has been all that great here.

“We broke down twice right before we were supposed to get to Vegas,” the keyboardist recalls of past stops here. “The third time that we came to Vegas was the first time that we actually drove into the city as opposed to being towed in.”

Still, it’s a breeze compared to making the rounds in the band’s homeland.

“Canada is pretty rough for touring,” Huson sighs. “I mean, it’s like 10-12 hour drives between cities. That’s the main appeal of touring in the U.S. We can get to a major city in a few hours, pretty much.”

Hello Operator plans to spend all of this year on the road supporting its new release, “The Breaks,” an album propelled by bright synth and snarling guitars that crest into radio-ready missives that you could shake both a derriere and a fist to.

Digital hand claps and whooshing keys lend the band a slight new wave bent, though their tunes burst apart at the seams with the arena rock hooks befitting of a Canuck Cheap Trick.

But for all its electronic embellishments, the disc still pulses with a visceral, lived-in edge that counters the sometimes sterile nature of machine music.

“We knew that we definitely wanted it to be a rock album,” Huson says. “Mike (Condo, singer/guitarist) and I kind of got our start as a Cars-y type of band. It was pretty true to a Ric Ocasek vibe. We knew that we wanted to go with more organic drums and big guitar tones, but we still wanted some quirky synth. There’s a digital side of keyboards and an analog, organic sound to keyboards, depending on what you play it through.”

Because of this, the album works on two levels: On one hand, with its sky-high choruses, the band’s tunes are immediate enough to hum after the first listen, but put some headphones on, and the mix deepens with layers of percolating sounds and an attention to detail that manifests itself in all sorts of shifting electronic textures.

“With our type of music, that’s kind of the way that I see that it should work,” Huson says. “It’s like we’re a river, but we’re connected to an ocean, so we’re not writing Kelly Clarkson songs, but we’re all connected to this pop ideal. It stems from there.”

True to Huson’s words, Hello Operator actually opened for teen pop queen Hilary Duff on a Canadian arena tour a few years back, making them the rare band that can win over underground electro fashionistas and mainstream Disney radio devotees.

“It was pretty fun, actually,” Huson recalls. “It was out of nowhere for all of us, something that was completely out of our context. All of sudden, we went from touring clubs in our crappy van to being in a bus with a big screen TV and bunks and everything — never mind that we were playing for 10,000 people every night. I still don’t even know what to say about it, and it was like two years ago. It’s become part of the story of our band.”

Since then, Hello Operator has gone back to slugging it out on the road in a beat-up van. They book their own tours, record and release their own albums and handle most aspects of running a band themselves.

They don’t ask for much — except for the occasional warm front.

“For us, we always played in punk bands, and that’s what we’ve always known to do,” Huson says of the band’s self-sufficient approach. “We’ve never been ones to wait around for a record deal or management to take care of this and that. We record and we tour. That’s what we do.”

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0476.