CAMBODIAN CALLING The country’s classic rock rings true for Dengue Fever.
PHOTO: KEVIN ESTRADA
PHOTO: KEVIN ESTRADA
Dengue Fever revives the lost sounds of Cambodian pop.
On that fever-dream day in 1997, when Ethan Holtzman was headed to a hospital in Phnom Penh after a jaunt to Angkor Wat—his backpacking buddy suffering from dengue fever in the back of a pickup truck filled with Cambodian hitchhikers and blasting ’60s Khmer rock out the windows—he couldn’t have imagined that, eight years later, he’d be cauterizing some of that nation’s oldest wounds with searing jams of his own.
Holtzman and his brother, Zac, returned to Cambodia in 2005 with a far less virulent strain of Dengue Fever, the L.A. band they formed after injecting themselves with as many ’60s and ’70s Cambodian-pop cassettes and reissues as they could score. Fueled by the psychedelic-surf licks of Ethan’s Farfisa organ and Zac’s guitar, and funded as part of a documentary film (Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, slated for a DVD release later this year), the group barnstormed through the capital and countryside with its modern spin on golden-oldies Khmer rock—the first Westerners to resuscitate that form in the Southeast Asian country since the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal Communist regime of the mid-1970s.
It was an elliptical and profound moment: Many of Cambodia’s pioneering pop artists had been, conversely, influenced by the American psychedelic and garage rock they heard on Armed Forces radio during the Vietnam War. After Pol Pot came to power in 1976, the nation’s artists and intellectuals were targeted, their ranks nearly decimated. Today, though there are signs of rock’s resurgence, Cambodian popular music has lost much of its earlier edge, deflated by an oversaturation of karaoke-inspired bubblegum.
“I think it moved a lot of Cambodians. What we did brought people back to an era, especially the older folks that remembered it,” says Senon Williams, the band’s bassist. “I mean, we’re playing these songs that, in their heyday, were big, number-one pop songs, and they were completely wiped out. Some musicians survived by singing basically propaganda songs, but many just shut up or went into hiding, got rid of or destroyed their instruments. Some of the tunes survived, but I think the style we play encapsulates the original spirit of those songs more than the karoake-style renditions that are played today.”
It didn’t hurt that the group had enlisted a ringer, a bona-fide homecoming queen locals cheered for “Cambodianizing” her American bandmates.
The Holtzmans first heard their singer, Chhom Nimol, performing at the Dragon House, a supper club in Long Beach, California’s thriving Cambodian-immigrant community. It turned out Nimol and her sister and brother were celebrated members of a “Jackson 5–esque family of singers in Cambodia,” Williams says. “As soon as Nimol walked in, the other girls instantly came down with colds. It was like a comedy.”
Dengue Fever’s original impulse was to borrow from Cambodian-style performances, which entail several female singers taking turns on lead, and periodically exiting to make costume changes. “But as soon as Nimol started singing, we forgot about that,” Williams says. Still, the singer was initially wary of the band’s obsession with Cambodian music. “It became a race to get some legitimate shows so Nimol wouldn’t think we were crazy. Now, she complains sometimes, like a little sister might: ‘Oh, it’s so exhausting. I’m the star, and I gotta rock for every song!’ ”
Nimol sings mainly in Khmer, and her penchant for slow, sentimental ballads crops up here and there on Dengue Fever’s three albums, but it’s the band’s swirling, psych-spiked jams on which the ornamental filigree of her high-pitched voice really catches fire. Its latest release, Venus on Earth (M80 Music), features all original tunes (as opposed to the cover renditions of classic Khmer rock songs that populated previous albums). There’s also a more articulated balance of Cambodian pop and American psych-surf, liberally spiced with a wildly percolating blend of Middle Eastern melodic lines, Bollywood soundtrack, spaghetti-western horns, smoldering 007 torch themes and Martian go-go.
That multicultural interplay makes Dengue Fever unique, but also impossible to categorize as either a rock band or world-music act. It debuted the songs on Venus last fall in Seville at WOMEX, the planet’s biggest world-music conference, but the band’s equally at home in gritty indie-rock venues, Williams says.
“It’s good for us to be in this position where we can play a show with Jonathan Richman or with Baaba Maal,” he explains. “We are kind of straddling the line between. The rock scene could care less, ’cause we’ve got distorted guitars and a beat you can dance to. And at the same time, the world-music people might be realizing you don’t have to be in some kind of dashiki prints to play world music.”
Dengue Fever plays Empty Bottle Wednesday 27.
On that fever-dream day in 1997, when Ethan Holtzman was headed to a hospital in Phnom Penh after a jaunt to Angkor Wat—his backpacking buddy suffering from dengue fever in the back of a pickup truck filled with Cambodian hitchhikers and blasting ’60s Khmer rock out the windows—he couldn’t have imagined that, eight years later, he’d be cauterizing some of that nation’s oldest wounds with searing jams of his own.
Holtzman and his brother, Zac, returned to Cambodia in 2005 with a far less virulent strain of Dengue Fever, the L.A. band they formed after injecting themselves with as many ’60s and ’70s Cambodian-pop cassettes and reissues as they could score. Fueled by the psychedelic-surf licks of Ethan’s Farfisa organ and Zac’s guitar, and funded as part of a documentary film (Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, slated for a DVD release later this year), the group barnstormed through the capital and countryside with its modern spin on golden-oldies Khmer rock—the first Westerners to resuscitate that form in the Southeast Asian country since the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal Communist regime of the mid-1970s.
It was an elliptical and profound moment: Many of Cambodia’s pioneering pop artists had been, conversely, influenced by the American psychedelic and garage rock they heard on Armed Forces radio during the Vietnam War. After Pol Pot came to power in 1976, the nation’s artists and intellectuals were targeted, their ranks nearly decimated. Today, though there are signs of rock’s resurgence, Cambodian popular music has lost much of its earlier edge, deflated by an oversaturation of karaoke-inspired bubblegum.
“I think it moved a lot of Cambodians. What we did brought people back to an era, especially the older folks that remembered it,” says Senon Williams, the band’s bassist. “I mean, we’re playing these songs that, in their heyday, were big, number-one pop songs, and they were completely wiped out. Some musicians survived by singing basically propaganda songs, but many just shut up or went into hiding, got rid of or destroyed their instruments. Some of the tunes survived, but I think the style we play encapsulates the original spirit of those songs more than the karoake-style renditions that are played today.”
It didn’t hurt that the group had enlisted a ringer, a bona-fide homecoming queen locals cheered for “Cambodianizing” her American bandmates.
The Holtzmans first heard their singer, Chhom Nimol, performing at the Dragon House, a supper club in Long Beach, California’s thriving Cambodian-immigrant community. It turned out Nimol and her sister and brother were celebrated members of a “Jackson 5–esque family of singers in Cambodia,” Williams says. “As soon as Nimol walked in, the other girls instantly came down with colds. It was like a comedy.”
Dengue Fever’s original impulse was to borrow from Cambodian-style performances, which entail several female singers taking turns on lead, and periodically exiting to make costume changes. “But as soon as Nimol started singing, we forgot about that,” Williams says. Still, the singer was initially wary of the band’s obsession with Cambodian music. “It became a race to get some legitimate shows so Nimol wouldn’t think we were crazy. Now, she complains sometimes, like a little sister might: ‘Oh, it’s so exhausting. I’m the star, and I gotta rock for every song!’ ”
Nimol sings mainly in Khmer, and her penchant for slow, sentimental ballads crops up here and there on Dengue Fever’s three albums, but it’s the band’s swirling, psych-spiked jams on which the ornamental filigree of her high-pitched voice really catches fire. Its latest release, Venus on Earth (M80 Music), features all original tunes (as opposed to the cover renditions of classic Khmer rock songs that populated previous albums). There’s also a more articulated balance of Cambodian pop and American psych-surf, liberally spiced with a wildly percolating blend of Middle Eastern melodic lines, Bollywood soundtrack, spaghetti-western horns, smoldering 007 torch themes and Martian go-go.
That multicultural interplay makes Dengue Fever unique, but also impossible to categorize as either a rock band or world-music act. It debuted the songs on Venus last fall in Seville at WOMEX, the planet’s biggest world-music conference, but the band’s equally at home in gritty indie-rock venues, Williams says.
“It’s good for us to be in this position where we can play a show with Jonathan Richman or with Baaba Maal,” he explains. “We are kind of straddling the line between. The rock scene could care less, ’cause we’ve got distorted guitars and a beat you can dance to. And at the same time, the world-music people might be realizing you don’t have to be in some kind of dashiki prints to play world music.”
Dengue Fever plays Empty Bottle Wednesday 27.
— Craig Keller
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