The task of presenting Dengue Fever-- an L.A.-area garage band with a Cambodian female singer-- would be a cakewalk for even the clumsiest marketers. Their novelty is clear, present, and safe; their assortment of 1960s minutiae-- from strange Cambodian translations of U.S. and UK psych-rock to spy movie soundtracks to surf-- is charmingly jumbled and affable. Every element shiny and signifying, straightforward and appealing.
And yet their style creates a little dissonance in me. Celebrating Cambodian garage rock-- a music whose practitioners were systematically executed by the Khmer Rouge in the late 70s-- is an odd thing to do without historicizing it, especially when the history deserves so much sober attention. But my frustrations with them aren't conceptual, they're practical. Vocalist Chhom Nimol has an elevatory, radiant voice that would overshadow pretty much any band she might be in. In the case of Dengue Fever, that's a special blessing. Even when their songs pass muster, the performances feel ineffectual, which makes long stretches of Venus on Earth drag semi-miserably. Even the styles they so dutifully ape had an imagination about what to do with the aural character of their guitars, whether through distortion, other effects, or a particular production style. Dengue Fever's textures are straight out of the box, as if what they thought what they're doing between the bars is novel enough. Sometimes it is. Usually, it's not.
While Chhom used to sing almost exclusively in Khmer, almost half of Venus on Earth is in English. There's such a thing as subpar lyrics that don't distract from the gestalt of a band's sound, but Dengue Fever don't find the balance. Instead, narratives about the strains of cross-continental love ("Tiger Phone Card") or the distinctly Southern Californian pain of having to pick up your drunk girlfriend from parties across town ("Sober Driver") tend to act more as a compounding element for than a distraction from the band's distinctly okay music. Gone are the few dazzling mutts that skulked through 2005's Escape from Dragon House (particularly "Sui Bong" and "One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula"); here are 11 well-forged set pieces that don't really add up to great songs.
I feel anal-retentive and self-loathing saying that I want to like Dengue Fever, but it's true: I appreciate that they're making indie rock music informed by a foreign stylistic context, I appreciate the mix of non-Western music with Western, and I love Chhom's voice. But there are better "foreign" bands, and musicians making more interesting mixes at the moment-- M.I.A., Tinariwen, and even some of Ricardo Villalobos' recent singles sound like they could be from more than one different place, and I mean that as a compliment. While Dengue Fever's intentions are good, their expressions verge on vacuous. Venus on Earth is the kind of benign aural tourism that always made me a little bored and suspicious of Air and even, occasionally, of Stereolab. But what those bands might've lacked in sincerity (if that's what you could call it), they covered for with diligence of craft. I'm generally up for pledging to lightness of mind and the revelations of exoticism, but if Venus on Earth is their idea of, well, Venus on Earth, I'll stick with Earth as is.
