Phantomelo

Fort Worth Surf-Rock Trio Phantomelo Weathers A Perfect Storm In The Video For The Dreamy New Single Off Their Water Your Friends EP.

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Phantomelo – “The Tempest”
RIYL:‌ Unwitting climate change PSAs.
What‌ ‌Else‌ ‌You‌ ‌Should‌ ‌Know:‌ On the follow-up to their 2019 debut EP, William Rakkar, Panda Cuenca and Jeff Gerardi of Phantomelo have built upon their unmistakable chemistry for their best release yet.

On Friday, the trio dropped Water Your Friends Pt. 1, offering up a set of brand new surf-rock bangers. While EP opener “The Tempest” is worthy of instant replay, it’s best heard while watching the fantastic music video by Coffee Pot Films.

The song itself shifts between dreamy and chaotic energies led by Rakkar’s apathetic lyricism as he wails, “The big one’s coming/I don’t care,” in a moment of the music video’s foreshadowing.

The visual for “The Tempest” begins with Phantomelo surrounded by lush woodlands before they’re suddenly cycled through waves of flames and tempered seashores — just another day of erratic Texas weather, really. Gerardi’s crashing of the drums strike with an eruption of riffs from Cuenca and Rakkar around the three-minute mark as the trio is engulfed by wreckage from the thunderstorm they’ve unknowingly conjured. Cuenca’s verses, though brief, provide for the perfect ghostly narration throughout the video’s climate change-like transitions.

At the core of what makes “The Tempest” great is the band’s ability, both visually and sonically, to channel their contagious dynamic — somehow they manage to look even more raw while miming on inflatable guitars and a toy drum set at one point in the video.

If they were a tropical storm before, “The Tempest” just upgraded Phantomelo to full-on hurricane. - Central Track

Somewhere in Garland, graffiti covers the dingy walls of an abandoned maternity ward. Silence is most likely the only thing to be found behind any of a long hallway’s several doors. It is rumored that the cat-like cries of spectral newborns can be heard echoing in the emptiness at night.

Suddenly, the silence is cleft by the stab of an electric guitar. As drums and bass join in, the haunting darkness is tamed, replaced by the sound of danceable rock music.

No, this is not a scene in a new Candyman movie, nor the setup of the latest installment in the Resident Evil video game series. This is just a normal rehearsal night for the Fort Worth dream-pop quartet Phantomelo.

he group has found themselves rehearsing in these spooky confines due to two successive floods to the house (and former practice spot) of singer/guitarist Will Rakkar and bassist Amanda “Panda” Cuenca in the span of three days last September. The couple suddenly found themselves out both a place to live and jam. A friend helped solve one issue by suggesting the maternity ward. It’s certainly strange, but they’re making the most of it. As they’ve gotten more comfortable there, “The Baby Prison,” as Cuenca calls it, may even have worked some of its mysterious alchemy into the band’s music.

“At first, it was really creepy, but it’s actually a cool spot,” Rakkar said. “I know there were a lot of babies born there, and I like to think that we’re bringing some new life into the world there ourselves with our music.”

This Saturday, the most significant of Phantomelo’s musical progeny will finally make its way into the sunlight. The band’s EP is dropping, and they’re hoping it not only continues the momentum they’ve been building lately but also that it takes them to the next level.

Adorably titled Pet Your Dog More, the four songs feature a new second guitarist, San Diego transplant Will Kimbrell, who joined Cuenca, Rakkar, and drummer Jeff Gerardi last fall just after the release of their first single, “The Tempest.” Kimbrell’s addition is immediately recognizable on the EP, as his contributions widen the band’s sound greatly.

“When [Kimbrell] joined the band, there was just so much more we were able to do,” Rakkar said. “Our sound is much fuller. We’ve really been able to expand the sound we make and successfully create a mood.”

In addition to Kimbrell, a great influence on the tranquil, dreamy rock of Pet Your Dog More is the work of L.A.-based mastering engineer Hans DeKline (U2, Pixies) and producer/engineer Taylor Tatsch (Maren Morris, Shadows of Jets). The band spent two days at Tatsch’s Audio Styles studio in the scenic Texas hill country last October. Tatsch offered the band much more than simply someone to set up mics and press “record.”

“Working with Taylor Tatsch was an absolute dream,” Rakkar said. “He really picked up on the vibes that we were trying to accomplish on the recording. Not only is he just great at recording, but he also offers creative ideas to make a song better. He just adds these little touches that really make it.”

A video for the EP’s first single, “Gum Love,” was just shot by Coffee Pot Films and will precede the album’s release with a premiere on Friday. The following night, Phantomelo commemorates the release of PYDM with a show at Lola’s Saloon with Ryker Hall, Hen & the Cocks, and Catamaran. There will be a raffle to win some of the band’s merch, and the first 50 people through the door will receive complimentary diffraction glasses to heighten the psychedelic experience of the foursome’s light show. Cover charge is $8 - Fort Worth Weekly

Phantomelo’s new single “The Tempest” starts with a simple, yet dreamy sounding guitar melody that carries through the song. “Talked about the weather/I didn’t care/I Think I’m gonna stay home/Wait it out,” sings Will Rakkar, soft and soothing.

The song, the band’s first release since 2019’s “Gum Love,” sounds light and it’s fun to listen to. But “The Tempest” carries a more serious meaning. A tempest is a violent storm and that is exactly what the song is about.

“’The Tempest’ is a song about the planet and what we’re all going through,” said Rakkar. “It’s about how the human mind copes with the always lurking impending disaster.

“It’s also about the unsuitable celebration of apathy at a time when the earth and its resources have never been in greater peril.”

Rakkar said that his interest in conservation was sparked in 2017 when his brother was in the path of Hurricane Harvey. While Rakkar was worried about the safety of his family, he realized people were making light of the seriousness of the disaster on social media. Then he started to become more aware of other natural disasters and the effects of climate change.

“All the natural disasters… mudslides, earthquakes… it just feels like maybe we have a little destructive trail that kind of follows us around through our lives from just simply living our modern lifestyle,” Rakkar said.

Rakkar, who also plays guitar in the band, met bass player “Panda” Cuenca and drummer Jeff Gerardi in 2017 while all three were navigating the Arlington music scene. (Rakkar says it’s a hotbed of creativity.) The band originally started as a surf-rock project, but, as things tend to do, Phantomelo evolved. The band now has a robust alternative sound.

“One of the great things about the human experience is trying as many things as possible and seeing what works and what is awesome and what is fun to do and what’s the most rewarding,” Rakkar said.

“The Tempest” is accompanied by a music video produced by Coffee Pot Films that features Phantomelo members performing in front of soothing nature scenes that morph into natural disasters. The video finale is a full-blown trash hurricane – literally. Rakkar said that the band and video crew saved their trash for two weeks to create the visual effect.

“People don’t realize how much waste we create, because they like to hide it from us over here… dump it in the ocean or put it into a pit and set it on fire,” Rakkar said. “What I thought was really great was, here it is! We’re just a small group of people and look how much trash we created in two weeks. It’s insane.”

“The Tempest” was released with a B-Side called “Crimson Tide”, and both will be on the upcoming EP titled, Water Your Friends. Rakkar says the theme of the whole EP is about giving back to the earth. Keep up with their new releases and shows on Phantomelo’s website, Facebook, and Instagram. - NPR-KERA-Art and Seek

Most musicians I know hate answering what most laypeople would consider a fairly simple, straightforward question: “What does your band sound like?” The dismissive answer (and the one that will satisfy your aunt during Thanksgiving dinner) is, “We play rock ’n’ roll.” The other way musos respond is by giving so many genre-blending descriptors, no one can really glean any real impression of what their band sounds like, but in the case of Phantomelo, this latter approach seems to at least get you in the ballpark.

“We’ve had a long-running joke about this in the band,” said singer/guitarist/keyboardist Will Rakkar. “We came up the phrase ‘gothic-psychedelic-surf-rock.’ I’m not sure that’s the best description, but it’s pretty close.”

Rakkar, bassist Amanda “Panda” Cuenca, and drummer Jeff Gerardi are set to release their first single, “The Tempest,” on Saturday at Lola’s Saloon. And although “gothic, psychedelic surf-rock” does touch on elements you’ll hear in Phantomelo’s music, it’s a better description of, say, The Cramps than it is the Fort Worth-based three-piece’s particular brand of dreamy, sensual indie-pop.

The track, which was recorded by Rick Greenwood at Denton’s Geneva Post Audio, features anything but dingy vibrato-bending hollowbodies. Rakkar’s sharp, up-down chord accents over an undulating, echo-drenched second guitar are more Interpol’s Daniel Kessler than the Cramps’ Poison Ivy or The Misfits’ Doyle von Frankenstein. And the vocal melody, with Rakkar’s percussive “Whoo,” makes for a Dandy Wharhols-level sing-along hook you won’t hear on Sisters of Mercy records.

Though “The Tempest” is a fairly focused pop song, Phantomelo’s other material is a practical stone soup of seemingly random tastes thrown together into some loosely cohesive amalgam. They shift wildly from Ventures-style surf leads to gypsy-jazz-inspired walking chord comps before slipping into a trilling pan flute-sounding solo played on synthesizer.

Even the band’s name is a call to discovering your sound from anything and everything around you. Phantomelo is a made-up bastardization of the term “ghost melody,” the name Cuenca gives to those moments when you hear rhythm or music in innocuous everyday objects, like the monotonous “whom-whom-whom” of a turning fan or the “chunk-cha-chunk” of a train along its tracks.

It’s this random absorption and implementation of disparate sounds and styles that Rakkar hopes listeners find interesting. Or at the very least, it’s given him the freedom to explore things he finds interesting.

“If you play jazz music and make a mistake, everybody knows,” he said. “But if you write your own music, nobody can ever say that. No one can say, ‘Hey, man, You messed up’ or whatever, because it’s your stuff.”

Ironically, underlying Phantomelo’s sometimes measure-by-measure musical left turns, there exists an indeterminate root of something that you can point to and say, “This. This is what Phantomelo sounds like.” But I for one am still not sure how I’d go about describing it. - Fort Worth Weekly

Phantomelo’s video for “The Tempest” from the Water Your Friends pt. 1 EP went live last weekend. An environmental song written ironically from an apathetic perspective about the world’s impending demise, “The Tempest” is accompanied by a music video placing the band’s members in the middle of natural disasters and ending with a trash storm made up of garbage saved by the band and film crew for two weeks. - Dallas Observer

Between climate disasters, attacks on human rights, seemingly never-ending pandemic tribulations, and, well, literally everything else, the onslaught of news feels harder to stomach with each “ding” of another notification.

For Phantomelo, it feels like swimming with sharks as they watch you bleed out.

“One thing that I didn’t realize was getting to me was, every morning I reached over to my phone to turn off the alarm and then notifications for the news were there, and it was just so fucking depressing and painful to read,” front man Will Rakkar says. “And I was starting my morning off like that like every day.”

Overwhelmed by the endless consumption of distressing coverage flooding our timelines — a modern magnifying glass for our leaders’ inaction — the band found the grace period for processing the hellscape we’re all living through is virtually non-existent. They arrived at a belief that “unregulated capitalism’s chokehold on America” is intentionally perpetuated by our politicians’ prioritizing wealthy donor money over actual representation gives us no respite.

“When these traumatic events happen, it’s like a smack in the face,” Rakkar says. “You kind of have to take a moment to readjust and find your balance again, but we don’t have time to do that anymore.”

Their solution? A raucous, fist-to-the-gills mantra for setting boundaries.

Produced by Taylor Tatsch and mastered by Rick Greenwood, “Shark Attack,” with its crunchy riffs and single line of lyrics, hits like a riptide washing somewhere near the shoreline of Wavves’ King of The Beach era. It’s doomscrolling exasperation slightly tempered with a breezy surf-rock bite.

“It’s become very numbing to hear news headlines, but that doesn’t stop me from creating some kind of art to pull out that emotion instead of feeling apathetic,” bassist Panda Cuenca says. “I’m going to reflect that back through my art — ‘Shark Attack’ is a rage song.”

Still, you’re more likely to have your own encounter with an apex predator than to ever find Phantomelo numbed to the point of losing their playful energy.

The music video for “Shark Attack” was filmed at Bedford’s Metroplex Wrestling by Irving-based Coffee Pot Films, and finds the trio in a triple threat wrestling match, each playing their own campy character clad in spandex and ball gags. Rakkar, Cuenca and drummer Jeff Gerardi step into the ring as “Stink,” “Pipishego” and “Two-Timing Larry” respectively, to face off against one another before becoming prey to a rip-roaring Shark Attack.

Despite the always-present looming threat, the band hasn’t given into pessimism.

“I think it’ll get better,” Rakkar says. “But I am no longer going to be having that morning shark attack kickstart my day — I just get that from my coffee now.”

“Shark Attack” is available on all streaming platforms. - KXT

After winning over fans and local radio play with their 2019 track “Gum Love” from the four-song EP Pet Your Dog More, boyfriend/girlfriend William Rakkar and Amanda “Panda” Cuenca put their band Phantomelo on hold during the worst of the pandemic.

Hold time is over now. With Cuenca on bass, lead singer Rakkar on guitar/keyboards and Jeff Gerardi back behind drums, the dreamy surf rock creators on Friday released a new music video an old-ish song, “Space Prom.”

“The third time we recorded was with Rick Greenwood out of Denton. It took three freaking years to get the song recorded,” Rakkar said about “Space Prom.”

The song was initially recorded in 2018, but the duo and Gerardi returned to Arlington’s The Cove Studio with Greenwood, who they said has an ear for their style. It’s been a long time coming, but they’re happy with the result, Rakkar said.

“As far as writing music, it kinda comes from doodling around,” Rakkar said. “Usually, it’s a vocal hook, but in fact “Space Prom” started with the bass line, but it always starts with the hook the Phantomelo way.”

Being in the moment and picking up frequencies in the ether are what the band looks for when jamming and composing a song, Cuenca said.

“Your body is a tuning instrument where you can tune into the frequencies of the universe if your mind is quite enough and you’re in the moment doodling on guitar.” Cuenca said. “It’s out there, but you just have to be receptive to it.”

“Space Prom” is lyrically different compared with what he’s written before, Rakkar said, with its contrast between a light, bouncy melody and dark lyrics.

“’Space Prom’ is more of a complicated song,” Rakkar said. “It’s about an alien who infiltrates the human species and is trying to wrap his head around the human experience. The alien fits in too well and ends up murdering people and then gets executed. It’s about the human experience and how something completely alien to our world would think that we’re kinda fucked up.”

The video for “Space Prom” is the third the group filmed with Coffee Pot Films, along with “Tempest” and “Gum Love.” A fourth music video with Coffee Pot Films is in the works, they said.

It took two days in production to shoot the latest music video. Rakkar said the Coffee Pot guys were a dream to work with. Rakkar said he feels like the film community really wanted to help with the new music video project.

The video was filmed at Arlington’s Sunshine Bar off West Division Street and stars Fort Worth indie rock Garage Barrage frontman and Coffee Pot Films editor Ian McKenyon. It was directed and produced by Anthony Melton.

“Anthony solves problems,” Rakkar Said. “This guy is next-level brilliant. He’s one of those people who if you bring an idea to him, and as hard as it sounds to you, he can figure out a way to do it.”

Rebekah Elizabeth and Joe Tacke (Mean Motor Scooter, Cloudland Recording Studios) contributed with puppetry for the video along with Rakkar. The puppets were made by Elizabeth. “Everyone in Mean Motor Scooter helped it in a way. It was during the pandemic, and it was really cool seeing them since we missed everyone,” Rakkar said.

The pandemic rocked the group last year, but the duo said they used the downtime to create. “It’s been a joy being back with the trio,” Rakkar said. “We filmed the music video for ‘Tempest’ during the pandemic and ‘Space Prom’ was filmed during the pandemic and we are about to film the next song for ‘Shark Attack.’”

The group also has another song they’re working on that was inspired by the pandemic’s loneliness, called “Wait For You.” Rakkar said the song is about overwhelming isolation and the idea of being stuck on a deserted island. “We’ve got some big plans for the winter time and we are gonna go full on 1960’s with this one,” they said.

You can catch the group at Lola’s Saloon in Fort Worth Oct. 8 for their release show for “Shark Attack.” - Dallas Observer