Dengue Fever - Venus on Earth
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Category: Music CD
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CD Details
Artist: Dengue FeverEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2008-01-22
Music Label: M80
Soundtracks:
- Seeing Hands
- Clipped Wings
- Tiger Phone Card
- Woman In the Shoes
- Sober Driver
- Monsoon Of Perfume
- Intergratron
- Oceans Of Venus
- Laugh Track
- Tooth And Nail
- Mr. Orange
Music reviews of Venus on Earth
Music Review: Cambodian Camp
Rating: 5 Stars
My first encounter with Dengue Fever (the band) was on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, where Terri Gross interviewed lead singer Ehtan Holtzman. She also played a few cuts, including the second on this CD, "Clipped Wings." I heard the same cut a few weeks later, on another NPR show, including a different interview with Holtzman.
Yesterday, on a lark, I asked for the disc in a CD haunt. The clerk had never heard of "Venus on Earth" OR the band. Who? He said. Fortunately, I found a copy, albeit the store's very last of any Dengue Fever album.
But music stores nationwide should stock and promote this amazing mix of 1960s and '70s rock style, featuring the ethereal, snaking, dipping soprano Khmer vocalizations of Chhom Nimol---pronto.
In 1997, Ethan Holtzman went to the Angkor Wat ruins outside Phnom Penh. On that fateful day trip, his travel companion contracted Dengue Fever and the pair "enjoyed" a sweaty bus ride back to Phnom Penh while their driver blasted classic Cambodian '60s and '70s rock songs.
During his genocide of 2 million Cambodian intellectuals, artists, students and city dwellers, Pol Pot had murdered all the talented composers and performers whose songs and performances they heard. The soul-stopping mixes---of static-guitar, fuzzy Farfisa organ, metal percussion, and Khmer women singing like perfectly high-pitched violins---blew Holtzman away. He bought all the Cambodian rock he could find and flew back to Los Angeles.
When Ethan's brother Zach also returned to L.A.---from a decade playing San Francisco clubs---the brothers started combing Long Beach's neighborhood known as Little Phnom Penh for a Cambodian singer to join their nascent band, Dengue Fever. In summer 2001, they found Chhom Nimol, at the Dragon House club.
Reluctant to trust them, she finally agreed to join the group, to which Zack also added some buddies---fans of Ethiopian jazz---Dave Ralicke (formerly of Brazzaville) on saxophone, drummer Paul Smith, and bassist Senon Williams (formerly from Radar Brothers), who'd also been to Cambodia.
This CD is Dengue Fever's third album; I love it so much I now plan to buy the first two also.
--Alyssa A. Lappen
Description of Venus on Earth
"A unique and surprisingly danceable group that combines a beautiful Khmer-language vocalist from Cambodia and a quintet of seasoned locals with a knack for mixing Southeast Asian pop, Vietnam-war-era lounge music, klezmer, ska, surf rock, and Ethiopian jazz." -- SPINpsychedelic. They are world music. They are anything but mainstream. There is virtually no other band in the world playing "Khmer Rock," the style of 1960s Cambodian rock derived from Armed Forces Radio in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Sophomore album Venus On Earth features eleven original songs that expand on the band's sound but will please hardcore fans of both the group and the genre. There is no other band like Dengue Fever, which garners fans in everyone from indie kids to well-heeled world music consumers.
At last, Dengue Fever has made an album that quite nearly matches their incredible live performances. The group began at least as a tribute to the playful yet heavy psychedelic pop scene that flourished in Cambodia before Pol Pot came to power and silenced countless suspected dissidents in that country's infamous killing fields in the mid-1970s. Like the Cambodian pop music that so enamored them, Dengue Fever began by revitalizing strong elements of '60s surf and garage rock in their sound. Over time, they've expanded their influences to Ethiopian funk and modern dance-rock. Once a multi-culti California band with a Cambodian-born singer paying homage to the past, Dengue Fever now plays original, swirling, psychedelic pop. With Western audiences ever more open to hybrid sounds, it will be a huge surprise if Venus on Earth doesn't allow Dengue Fever to quit their day jobs for good, especially after the film about their trip to Cambodia, Sleepwalking through the Mekong, hits the festival circuit in 2008. --Mike McGonigal
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