Dengue Fever intrigued but didn’t blow away a packed Hi-Dive on Wednesday. Photos by .
In a world ruled by immediacy, snobbery and buzz, itap sometimes sacrilegious to admit your dislike of the hot indie band of the moment.
Rewind a couple nights: I saw my friend Erica at the afterhours party, and I asked her if she made the concert earlier that night at the Ogden.
“Nah, I’m not a fan.”
“Really? But …” I wanted to defend this band that had just owned a capacity crowd of throbbing teenagers. Why? I’m not sure. They are an epic live band with a slightly less tremendous, but still stellar, record. But I don’t get all huffy when anyone takes my all-time favorites (R.E.M., Dre, Ted Leo) to task.
One of my favorite exercises at was telling all the cool kids that I just didn’t get the whole thing. My dislike for his music is likely similar to the dislike some felt for and his earnest chamber pop.
But I loved Stevens, and I can’t stand Lekman. And the fact that I dissed Lekman physically hurt some friends.
And that brings us to Wednesday’s show. The was packed, and the crowd was different than your average rock club crowd. One woman was wearing (gasp!) Crocs. With socks.
While at the bar waiting for my Cuba Libre (extra lime, thanks), I heard two older gents talking about the feature on Dengue Fever they heard on NPR.
And there we go.
This was a very NPR crowd, which is to say that itap much better than a NRA crowd. But these left-leaning, progressive folk were in the mood for a little world music, and thatap exactly what they got: World music, as heard through jittery indie rock time signatures.
I’m gonna come clean. I’m not a fan of world music. There are aspects of it I can appreciate, and I adore musicians — including and, to an extent, — that translate their love of world/worldly music into something completely different.
But Dengue Fever is not that band. Singer Chhom Nimol is lovely, and her voice is gorgeous. She sings mostly in Cambodian, apparently, but to the untrained American ear, the lyrics and delivery sounds only distinctly Asian. Some of the songs were dead ringers for the Bollywood anthems that dominated the streets, clubs, taxis and movie theaters of India when I was there two falls ago, and while those are entertaining in that context, these songs often grew tiresome.
Again, this is coming from a critic who doesn’t like world music all that much.
For my tastes, Dengue Fever was best when guitarist Zac Holzman would join the mix, adding his own vocals to Nimol’s soprano, and sometimes fronting the occasional song himself. “Sober” was especially memorable, providing a thoroughly unique, indie rock-rooted exploration of culture.
The near-capacity crowd ate it up. No doubt, this band is touching on something that has incredible potential. But unlike M.I.A., they’re not likely going to be the entry point for a non-world music lover into that realm.
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Ricardo Baca is the Denver Post’s pop music critic.
Photographer is a regular Reverb contributor.
