What does a phantom chase through Bay View have to do with the death of Anthony Bourdain? More than you’d think.
The creative team making the connection between those two seemingly disparate things are the experimental pop duo Creature Weather and director Nels Lindquist, who — along with many helpful friends and colleagues — produced the unabashedly cool video for “Phantom Face” we’re premiering today.
Let’s tackle the song first. The band’s Tad Jameyfield wrote it as a means of processing Bourdain’s 2018 death, which hasn’t gotten any less painful with time. It set Jameyfield on a thoughtful exploration of “lost heroes, friends and family that aren’t here anymore, and how much I still learn from them by allowing their spirits to move me to widen my perspective and still stay close.”
If that sounds like Jameyfield pushed himself beyond the minor keys and dirge-like composition one might reflexively go to in a time of mourning, you’d be right. Instead, he put together a galloping track propelled by percussion that skillfully remains on the right side of frantic, courtesy of Creature Weather bandmate John Doyle. Jameyfield follows along on keys and tosses in some cuttingly melodic guitar while delivering rat-a-tat lyrics:
Rippling across the lake your face
Nestled in the pines up north our place
Those ruby-eyed apples hanging up so high
Killing time together to forget we’ll die
On the ground a phantom running through the streets
Windows that you opened for the world to see
Laying in my bed like Halloween
Staring with a mask wanting to believe
Jameyfield’s choice of an upbeat sound about the most dour of topics sprung from his overall approach to explore “the contrasting ideas that death is both loss and growth, and painful and hopeful, and pairing that with music that expands and contracts as the song builds.”
The video builds right along with it — and what a video it is.
Remember that “phantom running through the streets” from the lyrics above? It gets literal representation (and popcorn … more on that momentarily) in the visual version of “Phantom Face,” which was shot across two chilly nights in Bay View and a handful of other Milwaukee locales.
At an Anodyne-hosted brainstorm, Jameyfield and Doyle shared what Lindquist dubbed a “really intense, caffeine-induced vision” for the video, namechecking everything from The Blues Brothers to Vertigo to The Evil Dead. The overall feel leans more toward those last two, with Lindquist shooting on black-and-white 16mm film to create “a sort of timeless, haunting quality.”
He also pointed out that it allowed him to have a lot of fun in post-production, layering in some choice effects that really make the video what it is. Well, that and the narrative, which sees Jameyfield pursued by a scraggly looking phantom while Doyle pursues (and attains) popcorn from the Avalon Theater.
That leads to the final contrast of this wild project: all three of the video’s members deciding to end the chase, grab a seat and have a snack. And then dance.
“Ultimately, all characters reconciling on a park bench sharing said popcorn, spliced with scenes of a bombed out basement and trippy visual effects, made the video feel like a statement of feelings that was both intriguing and entertaining,” Jameyfield said. “I could feel a lot of what I wrote in the song on the screen, even though they are not exactly related.”
It’s a truly harmonious marriage of sound and scenes that doubles as a single off Creature Weather’s full-length debut album, Moonlight Regions, coming out later in the spring. For now, we can enjoy the video and check out more music from the upcoming project on the duo’s Bandcamp page. You can also follow them on Instagram, where they’ll announce all of the shows happening around the album’s release.
