Smooth Dengue Fever, doing it all at once

Tue, Mar. 4, 2008
philly.com

By Sam Adams
For The Inquirer

A few seconds into Dengue Fever's third CD, Venus on Earth, a two-note organ vamp is blotted out by what sounds like long-distance radio static, squelching and bleeping and eventually resolving itself into song.

Drawing on the Cambodian pop music of the 1960s, itself a hybrid incorporating American surf and garage rock, and infusing it with a dose of 21st-century self-awareness, the L.A. band's music is tuned between stations, with occasional bursts of static.

Dengue Fever's nucleus is guitarist and songwriter Zac Holtzman, whose foot-long beard makes him look like a wayward rabbi, and singer Chhom Nimol, who emigrated from Cambodia in 2000.

On stage Sunday night at the Gild Hall in Arden, Del., the disparity between Chhom and her backing band was almost comical. Dressed in a glittering gold minidress, she might have just stepped out of a Phnom Penh disco, while the five men behind her were garbed for the occasion in flowing robes and thrift-store turbans. It was a little like turning onto a quiet street in suburban Delaware and walking into the cantina from Star Wars.

While most of Chhom's vocals are sung in Khmer, she and Holtzman dueted on "Tiger Phone Card," a tongue-in-cheek tale of cross-continental romance that finds him enjoying Ambien-enhanced dreams of her while she complains, "You only call me when you're drunk." Some things stay the same in any language.

Equally at home with art rock and retro-pop, Dengue Fever's musicians kept the pieces from crashing into each other. Paul Dreux Smith and Senon Gaius Williams on drums and bass, respectively, smoothly worked in elements of funk and swing, while Ethan Holtzman - who traveled to Cambodia in 1997 then introduced his brother, Zac, to its music - added organ lines straight out of the "96 Tears" playbook. David Ralicke played his saxophone through an array of effects pedals so that at times it sounded like he was playing several horns simultaneously - appropriate for a pan-cultural band that never does only one thing at a time.