DENGUE FEVER

With Cannibal Courtship (Fantasy Records/Concord Music Group), their fourth album, the Los Angeles based sextet – singer Chhom Nimol, guitarist-singer Zac Holtzman, keyboardist Ethan Holtzman, brass and woodwinds player David Ralicke, drummer Paul Dreux Smith and bassist Senon Gaius Williams – has reached a powerful new plateau, deftly balancing the wide-ranging influences that inform their sound and songs. “Before it was partly Cambodian and partly indie rock,” explains Williams of the band’s evolution. “Now it’s 100 percent both.” From snaking, driving rock (“Cement Slippers,” “Family Business,” “2012,” and the title track) to Cambodian dub psych-groove (“Uku”) and everywhere in between (the bilingual, gear-shifting tour de force “Only a Friend,” the mesmerizing “Mr. Bubbles”), Cannibal Courtship is, like the tropical malady that gave the band its name, wildly catching. Longtime fans will get their required dose of Nimol’s haunting vocals and the band’s other-worldly, mood-swinging musical experimentation on the new disc – their first studio album since 2008’s Venus on Earth – but the group, which produced the set together, has upped the creative ante. The seamless musical chemistry evidenced here is a reminder that the band is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in 2011. The seed for the project was planted when Ethan Holtzman traveled to Cambodia in 1997; during that trip he fell in love with the country’s take on rock music (Khmer rock as it came to be known) – and saw a friend suffer through the illness that would give Dengue Fever its moniker. He and his brother, who’d also fallen in love with the subgenre entirely on his own when living in San Francisco, assembled the other musicians. But when they heard Nimol, a star in her home country who’d performed for the King and Queen of Cambodia, sing at Long Beach venue the Dragon House, the collective’s sound came together.