Dengue Fever preview

Dengue Fever
Empty Bottle, Chicago
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Ry Cooder aside, American rock musicians are all about approximating or idealizing when chasing foreign tones. Not to pick on Beirut or Devotchka, but their only authenticity is the indie rock underpinning. Ethan and Zac Holtzman didn’t want to be total charlatans when they formed L.A.’s Dengue Fever.

Sharing fondness for ’60s Cambodian pop (no Wikipedia page on that, bub) the Holtzmans recruited Khmer singer Chhom Nimol, whose cred includes performing for Cambodian royalty. That she didn’t spit in their faces as a reply is astonishing. Dengue are teeming with contrasts: The brothers and their other bandmates routinely turn performances into laugh riots while Nimol patiently awaits order. (More extreme instances find Nimol crying real tears when dedicating songs to victims of the homicidal Khmer Rouge regime.) The cover art for this winter’s Venus On Earth (M-80) cheekily depicts Zac steering a moped while Nimol — acting the deferential, female East Asian stereotype — gamely rides the rear seat.

The allure is their psychedelic reinterpretation of the Cambodian take on Western pop. The farfisa takes a major role under surf-guitar leads, which made “Ethiopium” a shoe-in for Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers soundtrack. While their first album actually recreated Cambodian originals penned by the likes of Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea, 2005’s Escape From Dragon House and Venus both claim total originality and the L.A. influence becomes less circumspect. Nimol’s still most impressive when singing in her own tongue (“Laugh Track” is by far the best cut on the new album), though her duet with Zac on “Tiger Phone Card” and the sultry cooing of “Sober Driver” show the corner almost fully turned.

Can I interest you in a great Azerbaijani country rock band . . .

Cordero and Allá open.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly