An exotic blend

March 24, 2008
Houston Chronicle

Dengue Fever is ready to spread across the country

Dengue Fever has no trouble getting noticed. It's a Los Angeles-based band that combines '60s California garage rock with Cambodian pop. Its principal songwriter and guitarist has a whopper of a beard, its bass player tips close to 7-feet tall and its singer probably doesn't stand 5-feet tall in heels.

She also sings almost exclusively in Khmer.

The band's back story has been told, but since Dengue Fever, which plays the Orange Show on Saturday, is just beginning to spread, here's a short recap:

Keyboardist Ethan Holtzman visited Cambodia years ago with a friend. He came back with a sack full of cassettes of Cambodian music. His friend came back with dengue fever.

Holtzman and his guitarist brother Zac soaked up the sounds of those tapes and, according to Zac, "We talked about the crazy idea of pulling together a Cambodian psychedelic-rock band. The ball was rolling."

Zac Holtzman had been searching for the right band. He recalls being in a high school band that "played maybe two parties. Our guitarist was kind of nerdy. He'd play Spirit of Radio."

He joined a San Francisco band called Biefelhed, which ended up on a tour with instrumental-guitar guru Link Wray. Wray would call Zac out to sing. Since he didn't know all the lyrics to Born to Be Wild, he'd throw himself into the audience midsong.

"His wife was this crazy woman named Olive," Zac says. "She was from Holland. She was very worried about me. 'I think that you will hurt yourself.' Link would cut her off. 'I like it. I like it when you jump off the stage.' "

Zac describes his Biefelhed work as having a lazy alt-country vibe. Perhaps something about working with Wray stuck, because with Dengue he's moved to a grittier sound rooted in '60s styles like surf and garage rock.

But before going there, Dengue needed a singer.

The brothers set about Long Beach — which has a huge Khmer-speaking population — looking for a singer and happened upon Chhom Nimol, a diminutive woman with a big voice, who was a star back in Cambodia, but was working a nightclub in Los Angeles. She spoke no English, but was game to join. "We got pretty lucky with our singer," Zac says.

Big bass and blaring brass fill things out. The mix is exotic without the New Agey vibe that is affixed to "world music." It's not without a sense of nostalgia, but seeing as the players are all in their 30s, it's hardly as though they grew up immersed in these sounds. There's a celebratory party-music feeling to Dengue Fever's music, in no small part due to its members' sense of discovery. They're making a modern vintage.

Dengue Fever has evolved much since its first album, a self-titled assortment of covers, including several of the songs by Cambodian pop artists who disappeared during the Khmer Rouge's regime. Rock musicians did not fare well during its rule.

The new Venus on Earth shows more growth. The '60s garage-rock influence isn't quite so deliberate. It's as though the elements that make up Dengue Fever have begun to meld into one. Venus includes three songs in English. And it's all original material.

That said, Zac says the band continues to drive to Long Beach to shop for new music. One place is a gift shop and hair salon. "They have boxes of CDs you can dig through," he says. "You're pretty much going by the cover: the hairdos, how tight the pants are.

"We'll come home with 20 CDs, and from that we might pull about three good songs."

Such surface-level assessment has certainly earned Dengue some attention; it's a difficult band to miss. But Zac has long-term plans for the band.

"You definitely get noticed doing something nobody else is doing," he says.

"But we'd like to do more than get noticed. We're kind of going about it the way most people go about doing any kind of band. Pull people together who are like-minded, whose tastes go together nicely, and let it go."