Dengue Fever effectively gave two fingers to the commercial music industry last year when the band announced it was forming its own music label, Tuk Tuk Records. Corporate outfits nearly always wanted full-length albums, which required lots of material and tons of time. The move to independence would allow the LA-based sextet to make and sell music faster and in ‘smaller chunks’.
That was the promise.
The first offering came 12 months later. Girl From The North, a modest three-song EP, arrived on December 3 in conjunction with a one-off Christmas freebie, Little Drummer Boy. The EP represents the band’s first original offerings since its 2011 album, Cannibal Courtship.
The four new cuts seem likely to mark a turning point in the band’s evolution. Since Escape From the Dragon House, their second album in 2005, the group has mostly plied the waters between eclectic world/indie and Golden-era Khmer rock. But these new cuts, Little Drummer Boy included, transcend the band’s diverse musical influences to arrive at a sound that is discretely grander than any of its contributing parts.
No longer is Dengue Fever an American indie band playing Khmer rock. Or an LA band with an exotic Cambodian singer. With Girl From The North, Dengue Fever delivers a sound that, while certainly familiar, is far richer than anything you’ve heard from them in the past.
Witness Little Drummer Boy, the band’s soulful remake of Katherine Kennicott Davis’ 1941 Christmas classic: the song opens with a drum fill and plunges straight into a slow-struttin’ rhythm built on bluesy guitar licks and punctuated by low-end horn blasts. The music provides a tapestry of funk across which singer Chhom Nimol weaves a ribbon of sensuous Khmer vocals. While there are hints at such mastery in the Dengue Fever catalogue, nothing previously has ever come together so righteously.
The three cuts off Girl From The North take a similar tack. The EP’s first track, Taxi Dancer, is reminiscent of music from the band’s second and third albums, but this time around there is less the sense that Chhom Nimol is just singing a Khmer song on top of American rock ‘n’ roll beats. The two styles now mesh seamlessly to create something altogether new and unique.
Taxi Dancer begins with familiar sounds: brooding woodwinds, melodic guitar arpeggios and Ethan Holtzman on the Farfisa organ. When Chhom Nimol comes in, it’s with vocals at a pitch lower than usual and sung more in the Western style. An Echoplex on the guitars adds to the overall trippy feel and by the time the refrain comes around, Chhom Nimol’s vocals have jumped back up an octave and the whole thing sounds like it belongs in a David Lynch film.
On Deepest Lake on the Planet, the band dives into an underwater world of noir-ish dream-pop with haunting, repetitive vocals, spooky rhythms and more tripped-out Holtzman-esque guitars. A showcase for Chhom Nimol’s vocal range, the verses allow the Cambodian singer to move effortlessly along the low end then soar high through the refrains.
The EP’s final cut, the eponymous Girl From The North, has its roots in a Battambang jam session with the musicians from Phare Ponleu Selpak. Dengue Fever played an early version of Girl at their FCC gig in May. The song represents the perfect culmination of influences: the electric guitar licks are Khmer in their essence; the rhythm a bluesy, heavy-in-the-low-end beat as weatherworn as the Mekong River. Dreamy guitar licks and a horn solo fill the break and anchor the song firmly in the rock ‘n’ roll tradition.
In all, Girl From The North is probably the kind of offering that most major labels wouldn’t even consider: too short, too exotic. Yet it’s arguably Dengue Fever’s finest work. Commercial labels might balk at the brevity, but that Girl From The North counts only three songs hardly matters. After all, it’s not quantity they were shooting for.
Girl From The North is available now on CD and as a digital download from denguefevermusic.com.
WHO: Dengue Fever
WHAT: Girl From The North EP
WHERE: denguefevermusic.com
WHEN: Now
WHY: Dengue Fever at their very best