You Give Me Fever

On the transcontinental love song, Tiger Phone Card, the Cambodian woman lives in Phnom Penh and the American man in New York City. The lyrics are simple. Each short verse sung by the man alternates with another by the woman and then a chorus where both sing it together. It’s simple, cute and catchy. And it is the song that hooked me to Dengue Fever, a Los Angeles-based band that combines Cambodian popular music with indie garage rock. The singer, Chhom Nimol, is a diminutive Cambodian, while the five other musicians, including two brothers, Zac and Ethan Holtzman, are American.

MAN-WOMAN Los Angeles band Dengue Fever combines Cambodian pop with indie garage rock

Tiger Phone Card is a song off Dengue Fever’s fifth album, Venus on Earth, on which around half the songs are with lyrics in English and the other half in Khmer. It’s the ones in English, such as Tiger Phone Card, or Sober Driver (which is about picking up a drunk girlfriend from a late-night party) that you instantly relate to but it is actually the ones that are in Khmer that have a historical aspect to them. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, there was a thriving culture of psychedelic pop music in Cambodia but the notorious Khmer Rouge, led by the infamous Pol Pot, brought that to an end, annihilating many musicians, artists and writers, among the 20 per cent or so of the country’s population that it massacred.

Dengue Fever was formed when one of the Holtzman brothers visited Cambodia in the early 2000s and was inspired by the popular music he heard there. Chhom Nimol was a karaoke singer who was discovered by the Holzmans. She moved to the US and the rest is history. A self-titled album, Dengue Fever, was released in 2003 on which all songs were in Khmer. In fact, it wasn’t until their third or fourth release that the band began to adopt English lyrics. Venus on Earth came out in 2008 and is on Real World Records, a label started by Peter Gabriel, English musician, ex-member of Genesis and a big promoter of world music. In 2009, they released Sleepwalking through the Mekong, a documentary that explores the band’s travels to Cambodia where they performed local popular music that thrived in the sixties and the seventies. And this year they just released an album that celebrates that music: classics performed by Cambodian artists of that era. Sadly, many of those performers died tragically when the Khmer Rouge wreaked horror in Cambodia.’

It’s strange how it takes just one song to get you to explore the rest of a band. If Tiger Phone Card was what it took for me to get into Dengue Fever, then it was the impossibly funny Chinese Children that made me finally listen to Devendra Banhart. It’s not that I discovered Banhart recently.

Devendra Banhart is a witty American folk singer

I’d been listening to him, off and on, since the early 2000s. An American who was partly brought up in Venezuela (he got his first name from a suggestion by an Indian guru that his parents followed) before coming back to California, Banhart is a witty folk singer who has sometimes been critiqued as being an over-emotional neo-hippy.

The first time I heard Banhart, I found him, well, alright, but nothing great. Then, of course, as it happens with his music, it grew on me. The turning point was Cripple Crow, his 2005 album, which I consider to be his most accessible. It’s a huge album—22 songs, more than an hour and a quarter long—but what songs. Besides Chinese Children,, a humourous take on fertility, there’s the haunting the anti-war title track, Cripple Crow and the very funny The Beatles (a blingual song in English and Spanish). I turned back to older albums such as Niño Rojo and Black Babies and the nearly ten-minute White Reggae Troll. The last one, in particular, showcases Banhart’s versatility and talent.

Still, if you want to try Banhart, I’d recommend the marathon Cripple Crow. Why? Because on that album, his music happens to be the most adventurous and it’s difficult not to like at least half of the tracks on the list. Half. That means at least a dozen. You can’t get more value for money. That is, if you, like me, still buy your music, online or offline.

(Sanjoy Narayan tweets at www.twitter.com/argus48)End.