The global soundscapes of Dengue Fever come together beautifully on their latest

If you’re interested in watching a band come together before your eyes (or ears, as the case may be), then take a listen through the last few Dengue Fever releases. Their latest, Cannibal Courtship, blends the psych elements with the Asian influences in all the right ways, and it’s easiest the band’s best album to date. As Ethan Holtzman explains it, it’s just about giving a band enough time to become comfortable in their own skin and learn best how to play together.

Their latest also adds some African influence after touring with Fela Kuti’s original backing band and the seemingly disparate styles only congeal even more. It’s an interesting soundscape contrasted against the vanilla slate of Top 40 radio and it’s exactly why we wanted to talk to Dengue Fever.

SSv: Cannibal Courtship just seems like such an obvious step forward for the band — the one where all of the influences really click for me. Do you guys feel that way? How does this album settle for you?

Ethan Holtzman: I do think it is our strongest record so far. With all of the mixes and influences, we always keep an open mind. We bring them all to the table whatever it is that we’re listening to and we just see what blends. You can definitely hear some of the maturity in the way that we bring them together. We toured with Fela Kuti’s original backing band over in New Zealand and Australia and we definitely took in how they put on such a great live show. I think you can really hear that on “Only A Friend” and “Durian Dowry,” so there’s more African influences among the Cambodian and the psychedelic influences.

SSv: When you’re so in love with all of these different flavors and sounds, do you worry about editing at all? Is there a lot left out?

Ethan: [Laughs] Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff. That’s the way that we play. We bring a lot of material and then whittle it down in what you called the editing process. We want to keep everyone involved happy. Being the keyboardist, I’ll play more than enough things for the song. If we’re recording a song, I’ll do the parts I’ve written on organ or the Leslie on a few settings and then try it on other machines like the Wurlitzer or the mellotron. We’ll get a wide variety of sounds and then use what we want in editing. We do the same thing with horns and guitars and percussion. Especially with this record, we experimented a lot with more sounds and more instruments.

SSv: Who holds the tie-breaker when you are in those moments of tension?

Ethan: [Laughs] That does happen sometimes, but what we usually do is if someone feels strongly about a certain part or direction that a song is going… well, that’s one reason Dengue Fever works so well is that we get along really well and similar tastes. Imagine if we were artists and we were all painting at once with five or six people, if we were just doing a one-off, it would be a nightmare. But as a band, what we really try to do is let everyone do what they’re good at. We let them add their strengths as they can and let the song go in the direction that it needs the most.

With this album, we had enough time and enough songs to let things happen. I mean, we had six or seven extra songs that we didn’t even put on the record, because we had the luxury of not having to put everything on the record. We picked the ones that we felt the best about. As far as the process goes, you just have to take a couple minutes to relax and listen to everyone’s opinion and then if you agree or not, sometimes you just have to live with it. [Laughs] But for this record, we were all on the same page.

SSv: What have you guys learned about combining so many flavors over time? Was it difficult earlier on in the life of the band?

Ethan: When we first started, it was such a new process for our singer [Chhom Nimol] to write original material. That’s why we started with covers. It was just a good springboard for us to really get started. Then as we got familiar with what we wanted to do to become a band where we wanted to write our songs, that’s a process that she had to get comfortable with. Over time, her English has gotten better and she understands more, so now it’s a lot easier because there’s a lot more ideas that can come to the table.

In the beginning, we played so much on top of each other. There wasn’t a lot of space. I think that’s what we’re doing now with part of the maturity that we’ve figured out in the process is just to create space for each other and not play on top of each other. That allows us to blend these styles. That one song “Only A Friend” has an Afrobeat vibe percussively, but the chorus is more of a Beatles vibe. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a lot of that, so when our horn player called it an Afro-Beatles tune, it was really funny.

But the styles do fit nicely together — Asian influences with psychedelic influence and surf guitar. It all works. It’s the reverb guitars and the horns and the organs, they all work nicely. So it hasn’t been that hard. What we tend to do is just be minimalists now and not overdo it. It’s already busy enough.

SSv: Do you ever get bored with some current music? Is it too vanilla?

Ethan: I do in one sense, but then again there’s so much new stuff that’s coming out. I mean, you can come across a band that’s really new and fresh, so that’s great. But the current state of pop music and the stuff that’s charting, that’s not really exciting to me. I couldn’t really follow that. Sometimes I’ve done so more lately just so see what singles are doing well. I want to pay attention to some degree just so see what albums have on them and it’s interesting to listen to some mainstream radio and wonder if we even have a chance of fitting in there or whether we’re always destined on college radio.

*Photos by Lauren Dukoff