Music release
Cannibal Courtship
Cannibal Courtship is a 2011 album by the Los Angeles band Dengue Fever, sung in English and Khmer.[1][2]
About the release
Cannibal Courtship was Dengue Fever's fourth release and its first studio album since Venus on Earth in 2008.[3][2] One 2011 profile of the band counted it as the fifth album.[4] It was the band's first record for Fantasy Records, an imprint of Concord Music Group, and came out on April 19, 2011.[2][5] A record-release party was set for the Troubadour in Los Angeles.[6] The band produced the album together.[2]
The album holds 11 new songs.[2][6] About half are sung in Khmer and half in English, and it has more English lyrics than any earlier Dengue Fever album.[7][8] Chhom Nimol and the guitarist Zac Holtzman share the vocals.[7] The sound mixes Cambodian rock with psychedelic and garage rock, surf guitar, Afro grooves, lounge, new wave, folk, calypso, electro, horns, reeds and organ.[1][3][2] It reaches further into world music than the band's earlier Cambodian-based records and refines the cross-cultural sound the band had built over a decade.[1][3][5] The Living Sisters sing backing harmonies.[2]
The songs
The title track opens the album.[7] Ethan Holtzman explained that its picture of love comes from animals such as black widow spiders and praying mantises, where the female may kill and eat the male.[4] Eleni Mandell of the Living Sisters sings backup on it.[5] The lead single, "Cement Slippers," has Nimol and Zac Holtzman trading lines as an anxious couple who depend on each other too much, with a saxophone solo by David Ralicke.[5][4] The English-language songs mostly deal with troubled relationships rather than history.[4]
Nimol sings alone in Khmer on "Uku," which sets a classical Khmer folk melody over dense rhythms and includes a flute solo.[7] On "Sister In the Radio," also in Khmer, she tells of her childhood, when she was about nine and living in refugee camps in Thailand.[4] "This is my personal song," she said in 2011. "When I was a kid I lived in camps in Thailand. My family had fled."[4] "Durian Dowry" is also sung in Khmer and closes the album, and "Kiss of the Bufo Alvarius" is an instrumental.[1][8]
Background
Ethan and Zac Holtzman started Dengue Fever in 2001.[5] The band draws on Cambodian pop of the 1960s and early 1970s, the music of Phnom Penh that mixed surf rock, psychedelia and girl-group sounds.[4] That music did not survive the Khmer Rouge. Musicians were among the regime's particular targets, the singers Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth vanished, and recording studios and master tapes were lost.[4] Afterward, scattered cassettes were all that remained of the music.[4]
The band played songs from the album in an NPR Live Friday concert in July 2011.[9]
Track list
The main album includes "Cannibal Courtship," "Cement Slippers," "Uku," "Family Business," "Only A Friend," "Sister In the Radio," "2012 (Bury Our Heads)," "Kiss of the Bufo Alvarius" and "Thank You Goodbye."[3] Editions differ:[3]
- "Mr. Bubbles" and "Durian Dowry" appear on the digital and CD editions.
- "Genjer Genjer" appears only on the LP.
- "The Province" is a digital-only bonus track.
Access
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Wikipedia, Dengue Fever (band)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Concord, Dengue Fever
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Dengue Fever Music, Cannibal Courtship (July 10, 2020)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 Siddhartha Mitter, Sweet predators: the cannibal courtship of Dengue Fever (September 9, 2011)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Popdose, CD Review: Dengue Fever, Cannibal Courtship (April 19, 2011)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Boo Boo Records, Dengue Fever "Cannibal Courtship" 4/19 (March 24, 2011)
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 ALARM, World in Stereo: Dengue Fever's Cannibal Courtship (April 14, 2011)
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 The Tufts Daily, Exotic sound sets Dengue Fever apart (April 27, 2011)
- ↑ NPR, Dengue Fever In Concert (July 14, 2011)