Dengue Fever plays Moe's Alley on Feb. 1.
It’s tasteless and more than a little bit obvious to compare Dengue Fever’s music to the potentially fatal, fever-inducing tropical disease for which it was named. But there’s no doubt that the band invites the comparison by naming itself after the largely third-world affliction, taste (and hack jokes) be damned. So let’s focus instead on what makes the band’s music so damned contagious: a cross-continental mashup of heady psychedelic rock, bouncing Cambodian pop, far-out surf guitar and retro-futuristic kitsch that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on an Esquivel record.
Hailing from Los Angeles, Dengue Fever is a six-piece outfit led by former Dieselhed vocalist and guitarist Zac Holtzman, his brother Ethan and Chhom Nimol, a Cambodian singer the brothers discovered in a Long Beach nightclub after a fruitless trip to Khmer to find their chanteuse. The issues of cross-cultural appropriation suggested by the brothers’ blithe trip abroad to poach a Cambodian pop singer could supply a UCSC grad student with dissertation topics in perpetuity. But despite the ethical questions posed, the duo met their match in Nimol, who established herself as a commanding force in the band.
A star in Cambodia prior to coming to the States, Nimol greeted the brothers’ initial overtures with skepticism. Once assured of their sincerity, though, she became the band’s marquee name and its most essential element, her soaring vocals bridging cultural and genre divides every bit as effectively and provocatively as the rest of the band does in its arrangements.
To Dengue Fever’s credit, they’ve been careful to do more than resurrect and export the Cambodian psychedelic, surf-rock and pop music banned in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge for hip Western listeners. The band has returned to Nimol’s homeland to tour Phnom Penh and the surrounding countryside, a trek documented in the 2005 film Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. They’ve also put money back into the impoverished country, which remains one of the poorest in Southeast Asia, through partnerships with a number of charitable organizations.
This could all be academic if the band’s music weren’t so, ahem, infectious. On the band’s six full-length albums—most recently 2011’s Cannibal Courtship—Dengue Fever creates ebullient experimental pop for a globalized, culturally borderless world. And in live performances, any hypothetical issues of cultural appropriation are brushed aside by the band’s exuberant cross-cultural stew, presided over by a commanding vocalist who calls to the dance floor, not the lecture hall.
Dengue Fever
Wednesday, Feb. 1 at 8:30pm
Moe’s Alley
Tickets $16 adv/$20 door
