Always evolving at an accelerated clip, Piranha Rama may have formed as garage rock larva, but eight years later the band has legs. It’s fourth album, “Phony Frontier,” released last week, is living proof of strides they’ve made both creatively and personally, growing as a group to deliver more raucous and soulful neo-surf, psych-pop and R&B pedigree to many a stage throughout the commonwealth.
Brimming with confidence and gusto — like only a nine-piece band can — the latest material plays like a victory lap for Richmond’s preeminent party band. And they have plenty to celebrate after navigating the pandemic to complete their previous effort, “Omniscient Cloud Cover,” followed by a few tour dates opening for slacker-rock heroes Pavement before navigating the globally uncertain years since. “Phony Frontier” is the sound of a band regrouped and refreshed, still committed and focused on delivering its all-in vision across nine tracks of what they’ve coined “Hail Mary Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
“The pass is out and we’re gonna see if we land it or not,” drummer Tim Falen says when asked about their sporty motto over tiki-esque drinks at a popular Australian-inspired steakhouse chain. Do they feel like the ball is still in the air? “Yeah, it never lands,” says guitarist John Sizemore.
“A really common phrase in our practice room when we’re writing new stuff is, ‘Who else would do that?” bassist Chrissie Lozano explains. “Would anybody do that? I don’t think anybody would do that. Let’s do that.”
A supergroup spawned
Originally conceived by Falen, Lozano and Sizemore, likely either before, during or after a concert by one of their previous bands (Hot Dolphin, Lady God and/or The Milkstains, for those keeping score) it was a unique partnership from the start. With two fully-capable front persons in Lozano and Sizemore, the band expanded further once it recruited their ‘jazz friends’ as Falen puts it, to be their horn section and background singers for a one-off concert. Once Reggie Pace, Gordon Jones, Bob Miller and Kenneka Cook joined the fold there was no going back; members regularly tap in and out, topping out with an epic eleven-member incarnation on one occasion. It’s a lot, but the band’s performances all over town have allowed them to amass a wealth of material and a loyal following.
“Piranha Rama is one of my favorite bands from the last several years,” Bob Nastanovich will tell you. The Richmond native and percussionist for luminary outfits Pavement and Silver Jews was an early champion and released a few of the band’s records on his Brokers Tip imprint. “They make great songs and put on a blinder of a live show,” he says. “They are truly unheralded, and I don’t get it.”
Still, Piranha Rama is on a hell of a run and shows no signs of slowing, a credit to their cavalier approach of trying new things and always going big. “Richmond has such a wealth of artists and is such a great community as a whole,” Lozano says. “You never get bored.”
Listening to “Phony Frontier,” it’s evident the band was able to harness the sum of its powers to command such versatile personnel with the most demonstrated finesse yet. A relatively less virulent era in public health made it easier for them to get together and collaborate on songwriting, offering a new sense of cohesion.
“We found our personality a lot more as a single unit,” Lozano notes of the latest writing and recording cycle with Russell Lacy at Virginia Moonwalker Studio. “The songs evolve so much when we get everybody’s hands on them,” says Falen. This time, the band was even able to crack the code on older, previously unfinished material that had stalled out.
Style Weekly asked the original founding members of Piranha Rama to dive into their new album, track by track (which has been edited for space):
“Inventory”
Lozano: Everywhere you look, in every city you go, is another black plastic apartment complex nobody can afford to live in. I walk around and I see that stuff and I wish that we could evolve into working towards something a little better. Same with the medical industry. You’re not getting care as much as you’re a number on a spreadsheet. So much of human society is just being invisible and just being part of nonstop growth.
Falen: I enjoy the feel of the song a lot. It gives big pop anthem vibes.
Sizemore: I really wanted to write some riffs like Judas Priest or Thin Lizzy for Chrissy to sing ’cause I thought that’d be awesome.
Lozano: There’s musically a Kool-Aid Man vibe to it, being the opening track.
“Kid Sisyphus”
Sizemore: Kenneka’s rant is maybe my favorite thing on the record. I love to hear her cut loose. We had the lights off [in the studio]. She had a glowing orb that she was holding. I was like, ‘Speak to something fucked up, something you wanna scream about.’ Maybe not even that much direction, and she did two or three rants and the third one we were like, ‘Yep, that’s perfect.’
Falen: It was right after the first water crisis.
Lozano: Between water crises. You don’t even know how pissed you could get.
“Different Day Off”
Falen: One we brought back from five years ago. This time I feel like we all gelled.
Sizemore: I feel like it was always 90% of the way there, but we needed that extra awesome 10%.
Falen: We scrapped the old back-half of it and then did something completely new that was like, ‘Okay, cool. That feels good and super insane and crazy, but good.’
Lozano: It’s personal, but I try to get myself out of a funk, out of the self pity, out of the lamenting about changes in my life that maybe didn’t go the way I had hoped. So I was trying to capture a mood of like, ‘Look, I’m gonna get up today. I’m gonna do something different and assess everything and see if there’s some way that I can get myself through this.’ That chaotic end is almost like a rebirth feeling, like, ‘Get outta that funk.’
“The Favorite”
Lozano: Another one that we started working on back before the pandemic, before “Omniscient Cloud Cover.” We took a couple years away from it, came back and found the things we felt brought it out the door a little bit more.
Lyrically I would call this my ‘only child’ song. This is goofy, but I used to pretend I had a twin. It became a way to cope with things I couldn’t easily process. Getting in a fight with a friend at school? Awkward around extended family? Disappoint my parents? My twin didn’t have that social friction. There was a ‘real kid’ who did everything right and let me reckon with this wrath on-the-fringe thing I often felt. If I wasn’t the favorite, I could be the copy of the favorite. I don’t know [if] that was such a great tactic, as much as just a dodge.
Musically, this was another one we’d been hacking on for a while. It wasn’t the joy-bringer but we kept it in the bag. Then, honestly, when we were recording, it finally came alive. The horn hits, the dancing Bob [Miller] flugelhorn and Nat [Quick] guitar solos, the negative space, I think it became a real kid at last.
“Limbo Sparks”
Sizemore: A personal one I still haven’t figured out how to talk about.
It felt really good to finish it. I wrote it in like an hour one night when I was trying to figure out how I felt about something. When I was done, [it] was one of those typical songwriting things where you’re like, ‘Cool.’
It really didn’t change from that night to on the record too much, other than it’s not acoustic and it’s got the whole band. One of my more favorite guitar solos I’ve done is in that song, which is fun for me. There’s even a gap on the demo where I’m like, ‘That’ll go there.’
“Welcome Home”
Lozano: Written from the ground up. We took it off the rails. Definitely a Hail Mary. Why would anybody do this?
Falen: There’s just so many key changes.
Sizemore: It’s like R&B into an Alice Cooper chorus kind of thing. It seemed to work.
Lozano: I really liked the surf-y, pop-y, doo-wop-y feeling that we were getting there, and I wanted some really ridiculous, stiff backing vocals, we call ‘The Robo Ronettes.’ Once we got into the studio, the horns picked up that same vibe.
“Blues I Think”
Lozano: Kind of my ‘you had to be a beeeg shot, deencha?’ tune. Feeling sorry for yourself, trying to do it all, but why? Is it worth it? Probably not. Maybe. Ease up on your sorry self! It’s just the blues, I think. This one was also hiding out in the pre-pandemic vault.
Also, like always, but maybe even a little more, Kenneka’s backing vocals and the horns playing off of everything really brought this out of the door for me.
Falen: I feel like we had trouble sticking the landing on the end for a long time, but once we kind of carved it up, it really came through as awesome.
Sizemore: That might be the first one we finished when we came back to some of the songs from the pre-COVID days. The ending took us a while before, but when we came back to it, I think we all enjoyed the rolling weirdness and the spots for different folks to shine. Kenneka always ties the bow on tracks for us.
“Piranha Walk”
Falen: We set out to do something that we haven’t done before.
Sizemore: It’s our only instrumental. We just thought it’d be funny to write our own walk-on song and, not to belabor this, but like, I’d had the riff since I was way younger, but it had never been worked out. I was 20 or 21. It never fit in anything I was doing, but I was like, ‘I like that riff.’ And then Chrissie was like, ‘It’d be cool if we had an instrumental song.’ And I was like, ‘I got this one.’
And then we wrote it together.
“Green Place of Dreams”
Lozano: Another one that we put together. I brought in two parts and most of the lyrics worked out.
Falen: We were trying to go slow.
Lozano: Yeah.
Falen: And it was hard.
Lozano: I wanted it to feel like an escape into some other place, kind of inspired by going to my friend’s parents’ house after church. We’d all go out in the woods and wade in the streams. And then as we grew up together, they were going out there to smoke cigarettes and smoke pot. But, you know, those refuges from the world of authority and people asking you to do stuff you don’t wanna do. Or asking you, ‘what your problem is, man?’
I felt like it would be a nice way to tie [the album] up because it’s slow and thoughtful but it’s also those big, big harmonies, I thought natural.
Sizemore: A nice way to end it.
Piranha Rama’s “Phony Frontier” album release show takes place this Friday, Nov. 14 at Get Tight Lounge with Unmastered Masters, Russell Lacy and DJ Sidewinder. Music starts at 8 p.m. and tickets cost $15.
