Dengue Fever
A trip report from Nick Hennies of The Weird Weeds, guesting at The Rich Girls Are Weeping, notes that Dengue Fever ruled SXSW:
Dengue Fever @ Emo’s Main Stage — Thursday night Hands down the best performance of the entire festival. Within minutes the huge crowd who seemed unfamiliar with the band (probably early arrivers for Voxtrot later on) were hooting, shouting, and raising their fists in the air at this (I’m sorry but I have to swear) fucking amazing band. The best bass player in rock music got so into playing during their penultimate song ‘Sni Bong’ that he leapt in the air. The crowd erupted.
Sweet! I love Dengue Fever; Cambodian surf/psych-rock played by Long Beach dudes and a genuine Cambodian goddess. Plus they filmed a video at the flipping Integratron! mental. Wishing them every success, and hopefully they’ll play Dublin eventually. Somehow, despite living 30 miles from Long Beach I managed to miss them on several attempts.
In the meantime, check out these tunes:
March 21st, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Just a little correction — Nick Hennies of Weird Weeds wrote that recap. Sadly, I had to skip SXSW this year…
March 21st, 2007 at 4:38 pm
hi cindy — thanks for the note; I’ve updated the post a little to make that a little clearer, I hope.
(ps: long time TRGAW reader here; hooked by the Eno reference ;)
June 20th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Hello Justin. Do you have the Cambodian Cassette Archives disc? It’s a compilation of random bits of Khmer Pop from before it was realised that pop artists were counter-revolutionaries who had to be exterminated. I have the idea Dengue Fever are kind of a tribute act to that whole genre.
shameless link to post on my blog on the subject: http://inuitbikini.blogspot.com/2005/12/magic-of-khmer-pop.html
June 20th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
hey Ian! I don’t have that, no — I’d love a copy…
The story of Dengue Fever (as far as I can tell) is that Ethan Holtzman, one of the main guys, was backpacking around Cambodia, was taken by an old tape of 60s khmer pop, and somehow wound up (a) rereleasing it as “Cambodian Rocks” on an indie label in the US and (b) starting Dengue Fever, the band, as — yeah — a kind of covers band. Lots of the early Dengue Fever tracks are covers of the 60s tracks, although recently they’ve mostly written their own stuff. and very successfully too!
good interview: http://www.undertheradarmag.com/denguefever.html
Anyway, I have a copy of Cambodian Rocks vol 1 — it’s hard to tell if it’s the Ethan Holtzman version though, as there’s another album around with the same name and entirely diff tracks. It consists mostly of Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea classics… I’ve written another post about those two here: http://undersea.wordpress.com/2007/04/12/ros-sereysothea/
(btw I have a massive stack of classic Sisamouth/Sereysothea mp3s — let me know and I’ll Sendspace them over or something!)
also I can really recommend the most recent Dengue Fever album, Chhom Nimol has an amazing voice and they really make great music.