It’s still two weeks until the release of Venus on Earth, the third full-length by LA’s Dengue Fever, but the nice folks over on Inflight at Night have posted a new track called Sober Driver and boy oh boy is it the best trippy Khmer lounge music you’re going to hear all week.
Dengue Fever are the brainchild of a pair of bearded California brothers, who got a band together and then recruited Chhom Nimol, a female singer whose family was more or less the Cambodian equivalent of the Jacksons. Together they’re trying to revive the lost art of rocking out in Khmer. Their last album, 2005’s Escape From Dragon House, was a slow grower– slower songs like the carnivalesque Saran Wrap took a while to get into, although instantly poppy numbers like Tip My Canoe led to more than one embarrassing sing-along in the car.
Known for their live shows, they were the first band to publicly play Cambodian rock in Cambodia since 1975 and, judging from reports, people dug it. They’ve got a big California following, too, and they’ll be playing New York in March. (They might have more east coast dates than that, but finding tour dates is kinda hard for some reason. A really optimistic part of me hopes they might stop by Providence, which, not for nothing, has the nation’s seventh-largest Cambodian population.)
And if Sober Driver leaves you hankering for more songs that you totally can’t sing along with, head over to WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, which has posted 1996’s wonderfully psychedelic Cambodian Rocks compilation in its entirety.