San Francisco
Dengue Fever
Thursday, January 31, 2013 (8:00 PM - 2:00 AM) | 
The Independent 628 Divisadero Street San Francisco CA (Western Addicition)
Dengue Fever
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With Cannibal Courtship (Fantasy Records/Concord Music Group), their fourth album, the Los Angeles based sextet, singer Chhom Nimol, guitarist-singer Zac Holtzman, keyboardist Ethan Holtzman, brass and woodwinds player David Ralicke, drummer Paul Dreux Smith and bassist Senon Gaius Williams, has reached a powerful new plateau, deftly balancing the wide-ranging influences that inform their sound and songs.“Before it was partly Cambodian and partly indie rock,” explains Williams of the band’s evolution. “Now it’s 100 percent both.”
From snaking, driving rock (“Cement Slippers,” “Family Business,” “2012,” and the title track) to Cambodian dub psych-groove (“Uku”) and everywhere in between (the bilingual, gear- shifting tour de force “Only a Friend,” the mesmerizing “Mr. Bubbles”), Cannibal Courtship is, like the tropical malady that gave the band its name, wildly catching.
Longtime fans will get their required dose of Nimol’s haunting vocals and the band’s other- worldly, mood-swinging musical experimentation on the new disc, their first studio album since 2008’s Venus on Earth, but the group, which produced the set together, has upped the creative ante.
The seamless musical chemistry evidenced here is a reminder that the band is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in 2011. The seed for the project was planted when Ethan Holtzman traveled to Cambodia in 1997; during that trip he fell in love with the country’s take on rock music (Khmer rock as it came to be known) – and saw a friend suffer through the illness that would give Dengue Fever its moniker. He and his brother, who’d also fallen in love with the subgenre entirely on his own when living in San Francisco, assembled the other musicians. But when they heard Nimol, a star in her home country who’d performed for the King and Queen of Cambodia, sing at Long Beach venue the Dragon House, the collective’s sound came together.
Their eponymous debut disc found them covering their favorite Cambodian rock tunes from the 60s & 70s; they immediately won a rabid fan base and were named L.A. Weekly’s Best New
Artist in 2002. Their follow-up albums, Escape From Dragon House (one of Mojo’s Top 10 World Music releases of 2006) and Venus on Earth (2008) offered mostly band-penned tunes. This natural evolution from Cambodian covers to original material continues to this day with the band recording more songs in English as Nimol’s grasp of the language improves. The band toured Cambodia for the first time in 2005, a revelatory experience chronicled in the documentary Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, a film-festival favorite (the DVD and soundtrack were issued in 2009). The band also curated an anthology of vintage Cambodian rock tracks, Electric Cambodia, which was released in 2010.
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Thursday, January 31, 2013 (8:00 PM - 2:00 AM)
The Independent 628 Divisadero Street, San FranciscoCA (Western Addicition)
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