Dengue Fever gets magnificently bonkers

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      Sitting on sacred land out in the middle of the Mojave Desert is a strange building called the Integratron. It was built in the 1950s by George Van Tassel, an aeronautical engineer who claimed he was given the plans by visitors from the planet Venus. You can see it in the video for Dengue Fever’s 2005 single “Sni Bong”, and there’s even a song called “Integratron” on the band’s breakthrough 2008 record, titled, natch, Venus on Earth.

      Last year, Dengue Fever founding member, Ethan Holtzman (keyboards) actually got married inside the Integratron. “He’s trying to get to other planets, somehow,” drummer Paul Smith tells the Straight, from his Los Angeles home. “He’s definitely our resident UFO fan.”

      Smith allows that the Integratron has “a certain energy, I will say that,” and he has some sympathetic words for Van Tassel. “Regardless of whether it’s true or false, it’s a great little story,” he says. “Even when they’re crazy, when somebody has a strong vision, and they put in so much work and so much dedication, it parallels so much that we do—especially if you’re in a creative field, and you put up with hardship to do what you love.”

      Which brings us to the band itself, and Dengue Fever’s magnificently bonkers, time-and-space-hopping relocation of vintage Cambodian psychedelic pop in 21st-century Southern California. It probably shouldn’t have worked when Smith, bassist Senon Williams, horn player David Ralicke, and Cambodian singer Chhom Nimol were induced by Holtzman and his brother Zac (guitar) to pursue their obsession with one of the most obscure and fleeting music scenes in modern history. (Unknown numbers of Cambodia’s western-influenced musicians were executed in the ’70s by the Khmer Rouge.)

      But it did work, and how. Now on its fourth album, Cannibal Courtship, Dengue Fever has evolved from a novelty act into a truly singular thing, as if the B-52s, Redd Kross, and the Sun City Girls teamed up to make a party record in Phnom Penh. The single “Cement Slippers” has the ecstatic feel you get from a band that’s really hitting its own unique stride.

      “Yeah, I’d agree with that,” says Smith. “To say we’re an American band doing these Cambodian covers, that’s how we started, but it’s not where we exist now. It doesn’t even feel that weird to me anymore. We’ve been a band for a long time, and what we’re doing now is very organic. I don’t have a name for it. I think we’re just a band.”

      If there’s a track on Cannibal Courtship that really nails the Fever’s maturing personality, it’s the delirious “Only a Friend”, where all of the group’s emerging funk, jazz, and rock interests are folded seamlessly into its exotic surf-psych-garage-pop base. Smith agrees. “Definitely,” he says. “We call that our Afro-Beatles. Everyone loves that track in the band, and I think we all love it because of the fact that it does have everyone in it, and it does feel very much like us. It’s a crazy amalgamation that somehow works.”

      It’s crazy and it works. George Van Tassel would be proud!

      Dengue Fever plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Saturday (April 23).

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