Classic and Unappreciated: Cambodian Rocks

Is it possible to hear the sound of approaching doom?  Does approaching doom sound kind of like room tone, but darker?  Can we hear approaching doom squeezing a singer’s nerves tightly in its clutches?  Can we physically sense the presence of approaching doom as it plays maestro to an ill-fated orchestra?

For instance, some people seem convinced that they could hear Kurt Cobain’s demons lurking in the shadows of Unplugged In New York.  Yet how many of those claims come from keen human intuition, and how many are simply embellished memories revised by tragedy?  Hard to tell.

I can tell you this for sure, though: when I first listened to Cambodian Rocks, I heard something.  Something strange, spectral, and vaguely sinister.  I don’t know if I would have called it “approaching doom” back then.  But I definitely heard something.

Cambodian Rocks and I met years ago, back when I still clacked through the racks of used CD shops.  At first sight, Cambodian Rocks sure didn’t seem like a classic record.  The cover art looked like a crummy Xerox of a cheap postcard.  The back of the jewel case suggested the work of a company that advertised X-Ray Specs and Sea Monkeys to comic-reading kids in the ’50s  (“Great music and lots of fun!” the album says of itself).  In place of a track listing, there was a note from the album’s compiler, a traveler identified only as P.W.:

“…In a truck on our way up to Angkor, the driver had one cassette which he played over and over.  All of it was sung in Cambodian.  There was pop, rock, soul, and it sounded incredibly fresh.  I was able to hum my favorite song well enough to get a copy of it later…”

P.W. finishes by declaring, “You’ve never heard anything like it.” While I didn’t quite believe the hype, I was intrigued.  Maybe subconsciously I had an inkling that the musicians who played on this album would eventually become casualties in one of history’s biggest genocides- but I doubt it.  (In my defense, my 9th grade “Global Studies” class never taught me a lick about the Khmer Rouge.)  No, all I remember thinking at the time of that purchase was that Cambodian Rocks might be worth at least a few bucks and a couple of listens.

P.W. was right, though.  Not long into my first spin through the album, I realized I had never heard anything like Cambodian Rocks before.  It wasn’t merely the novelty of hearing the fuzzbox guitars, beach party beats and sly hooks of Western pop and garage rock filtered through the ancient spirits of Far Eastern folk music (though that part’s certainly very cool).  See, on the same day I bought my copy of Cambodian Rocks, I bought a similar comp called Thai A Go-Go, and I soon discovered that the latter paled hideously in comparison to the former.  That fascinatingly inexplicable something that oozed out of the Cambodians was nowhere to be found with the Thai.  So I kept on listening to Cambodian Rocks, trying in vain to grasp its elusive mystique.

It helped a lot that the album has so much more to offer than just its aura.  The strongest and most immediate allure was the young siren who appeared on about half the album’s tracks.  Her voice was outrageously nasal, yet full of grace and soul.  Her high-pitched quavering made her sound girlish and naive, yet she also exuded a commanding diva-like presence- somewhere between Diana Ross and Betty Boop, only Cambodian.

A few years later, once Wikipedia came to be, I was pleased to learn that the singer, Ros Serey Sothea, was something of a national treasure in her day.  She had the kind of voice that could lure you to a snail shop.  (No, really.)  The King of Cambodia himself called her “The Golden Voice of the Royal Capital.”

Then, shortly after realizing who she was and how much well-deserved success she enjoyed, I was crushed to learn that Ros Serey Sothea, like many other artists and intellectuals in 1970s Cambodia, vanished without a trace and was most likely executed in The Killing Fields.

Once I realized the connection between Cambodian Rocks and the Khmer Rouge, that peculiar something seemed to make a lot more sense.  The way those ominous organs pierce the Top 40 melodies.  The abysses between the cracks in the cheery veneer.  Those startling screams that start to sound less like teenagers blowing off steam, and more like honest-to-God primal fear.  They don’t really scream like that on Nuggets.

And that’s how it dawned on me that Cambodian Rocks was the sound of the Last Night On Earth Party that rages as as Pol Pot’s murderous goons batter down the concert hall doors.  Even the crummy Xerox postcard on the cover suddenly had another shade of meaning: the idols have been frozen right in the middle of a jubilant dance.  Invigorated by divine and ancient music, their arms reach to the heavens and their heels are so happy they’re kicking themselves in the butt.  The expressions on their faces are not quite so joyous, however.  The idols wear only faint traces of smiles.  Could it be that they can’t shake a bad feeling that someone’s about to kill their celebration in a most gruesome fashion?

Of course, that could just be tragedy shaping my perceptions again.

Thanks to WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog, you can hear all of Cambodian Rocks right here.