This Los Angeles combo continues to make some of the most unexpected music of the decade. Formed in 2001, Dengue Fever grew out of organist Ethan Holtzman’s interest in 1960s Cambodian rock. Originally setting out to cover the obscurities he’d collected on record, the addition of Cambodian vocalist Chhom Nimol gave the band an elevated sense of authenticity and set them evolving into something more original. Nimol originally stuck to singing in her native Khmer, but here she takes the step to switch between Khmer and English as the each song demands. The music remains anchored to the mix of psych, jazz, pop, garage, exotica and Indian flavors that came together in 1960s Cambodian popular music, and the seamlessness with which it all fits together continues to amaze.
Skip Heller is a man of many musical hats. He’s played and produced rockabilly, country, jazz and blues, composed television and film scores, toured with the vocalist Yma Sumac, and worked for the legendary composer Les Baxter. This 2009 release coincided with Heller’s score for Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball, and is clearly indebted to his work with Baxter (whose signature “Quiet Village” riff is repurposed in the spy-jazz influenced “Hurricane Apartment”), along with the music of Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman and Robert Drasnin. The latter even adds clarinet and saxophone here. Though Heller is often thought of as a guitarist, there’s nary a six-string to be heard in these arrangements. Instead, he plays piano, dulcimer (including a tsimbalom) and chimes; his assembled personnel add a variety of classic exotica instruments, including flute, vibraphone, celesta, harp and hand percussion.
A singular vision of Hawaiian-tinged Canyon Country
Those who know Courtney Jaye from her 2005 release on Island, Traveling Light, don’t really know Courtney Jaye. A pleasant album with glossy production, an airbrushed cover and some memorable pop hooks, it propelled her into the pop mainstream, culminating with some film and television placements (including a cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain”), and a performance on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. Not Conan or Letterman or Kimmel, but Leno, which tells you where her label was headed. She could see the direction the machine was taking her career, but unlike many talented young artists who sell their dreams short, Jaye shucked off the industry’s plans, took stock and reinvested in her own artist visions. She relocated to Northern California, Austin and eventually Nashville, and gathered into one set of songs the wide variety of sounds that had excited her ear.
The result is this independently recorded and released second album, with a cover that teases with the allure of Sandy Warner, and pays off with an alchemy of musical styles that bounce from girl-group to Topanga Canyon singer-songwriter to country twang to Hawaiian slack-key and exotica to classic Brill Building pop. Her knack for writing killer pop hooks is not only intact, but amplified by productions that have the spontaneous DIY charms of 1960s singles that weren’t belabored into aural numbness. Stripped of the debut album’s production gloss, Jaye’s voice is freed to launch emotional barbs into your heart. If you listen to only one song on this album, check out the video below for “Don’t Tell a Girl.” The melody and chorus hook are so necessarily repeatable as to make the track’s 3:30 about ten minutes too short. Somebody needs to spring Phil Spector from prison so he can produce a Wall of Sound version of this song.
The album opens with a lo-fi count-off and the drippy slide guitar that George Harrison played in the 1970s, but the rhythm has a Latin tinge and Jaye’s double-tracked vocal tumbles out with both need and doubt. It’s the sort of idiosyncratic mix of sounds that could only spring from an artist’s singular history of influences, giving the pained lyrics the bounce of false hope and the ache of unfulfilled longing. Jaye manages to suggest both the adolescent heartache of girl-groups and the more seasoned sorrow of grown women. She evokes Brenda Lee, Connie Francis, Kelly Willis and Rosanne Cash, but also, on the dreamily harmonized “Sweet Ride,” the mid-70s Fleetwood Mac sound of Buckingham and Nicks. There’s bending steel, acoustic and electric guitars, drums, ukuleles and baion beats that trace Jaye’s travels between Hawaii, California, Texas, and Tennessee. There are even some Arthur Lyman-styled bird calls on the instrumental “Maru Maru.”
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Vibraphone master gives holiday classics an exotica twist
