Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Dengue Fever
It wasn’t enough that the Los Angeles band Dengue Fever took ’60s Cambodian pop as their main architecture. They had the random good fortune to chance upon a Cambodian vocalist working in a Long Beach club who was willing to front the indie outfit. From the beginning, Chhom Nimol’s voice gave Dengue Fever an eerie authenticity and lifted the project free of being just another cover band with weird taste. For good measure, Dengue Fever infused their Cambodian set with an Addams Family-meets-surf rock bounce with intimations of psychedelic rock.
With all of that going on, one is hard pressed for a description. For one thing, you don’t know where the emotions will fall in this kind of music. But then, pop music from California has a history of delightful madness. The West Coast gave the world surf rock, psychedelic rock, Frank Zappa, and Orange County hardcore — just to name a few of the pure California genres that have infiltrated rock culture.
The band is barely seven years old, and on their first few CDs they performed only Cambodian-pop covers. Later they began to write new material in the same idiom, and Nimol sang some of the lyrics in English as well as in her native tongue. Don’t look to this band to make the rafters shudder — no guitar grinders here. Instead it’s fairly authentic (if dated) Asian pop stuff with Farfisa organ and a comic sax woofing around the melodies. The surreal atonality of the Asian musical scale as played by American rock musicians lends the feeling that one has entered into a kind of Jim Jarmusch time warp tempered by a gust of ice-cold Asian sexiness. Passing strange, yes, but from this catalog of disparate parts Dengue Fever has carved out a groove. Nothing this interesting or challenging, I think, since Morrison Hotel.
DENGUE FEVER, The Casbah, Saturday, April 19, 8:30 p.m. 619-232-4355. $14.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Dengue Fever
Dengue Fever
It wasn’t enough that the Los Angeles band Dengue Fever took ’60s Cambodian pop as their main architecture. They had the random good fortune to chance upon a Cambodian vocalist working in a Long Beach club who was willing to front the indie outfit. From the beginning, Chhom Nimol’s voice gave Dengue Fever an eerie authenticity and lifted the project free of being just another cover band with weird taste. For good measure, Dengue Fever infused their Cambodian set with an Addams Family-meets-surf rock bounce with intimations of psychedelic rock.
With all of that going on, one is hard pressed for a description. For one thing, you don’t know where the emotions will fall in this kind of music. But then, pop music from California has a history of delightful madness. The West Coast gave the world surf rock, psychedelic rock, Frank Zappa, and Orange County hardcore — just to name a few of the pure California genres that have infiltrated rock culture.
The band is barely seven years old, and on their first few CDs they performed only Cambodian-pop covers. Later they began to write new material in the same idiom, and Nimol sang some of the lyrics in English as well as in her native tongue. Don’t look to this band to make the rafters shudder — no guitar grinders here. Instead it’s fairly authentic (if dated) Asian pop stuff with Farfisa organ and a comic sax woofing around the melodies. The surreal atonality of the Asian musical scale as played by American rock musicians lends the feeling that one has entered into a kind of Jim Jarmusch time warp tempered by a gust of ice-cold Asian sexiness. Passing strange, yes, but from this catalog of disparate parts Dengue Fever has carved out a groove. Nothing this interesting or challenging, I think, since Morrison Hotel.
DENGUE FEVER, The Casbah, Saturday, April 19, 8:30 p.m. 619-232-4355. $14.
Comments