The Cesarians

It’s late 1950’s and Jacques Brel is singing in a smoky club somewhere between France and Belgium. Scott Walker is a fifteen year old American boy who hasn’t even heard of Brel let alone decided to record a large proportion of his back catalogue in English. Somewhere in the audience it seems The Cesarinas are watching, learning, furiously translating. Fifty years later, it is time for them to launch their masterplan, starting with debut single ‘Flesh Is Grass/Woman (Imprint). It is the best single of 2008 by far, ‘Flesh is Grass’ soars, it swoops, it takes you up, it takes you down form barely spoken verses to great crashes and roaring choruses. ‘Women’ takes it on with pumping horns and a snarl from front man Charlie Fnke. It is classic, dirty rock and roll at it’s best, a sound missing for at least twenty-five years we’re damn happy it’s back.

Bearded Magazine



More music should sound like a sinister Hungarian puppet show performing on a back street in Paris so thanks to The Cesarians for completely ignoring 60 years of popular music and reviving cabaret, Expressionism and the clarinet.

Flesh Is Grass, the first half of a double-A single, unfolds like a
three-act play with the mood firmly establish in the first.  A
three-quarters time waltz tempo accompanies the tense and revealing second act, before the dramatic and Bond-esque third.

The very different AA-side Woman is like Nick Cave with horns, by which I mean brass instruments, not Satan.

Colm Larkin, Clash Magazine

www.clashmusic.com


Paddling against the tide of day-to-day pop generics, The Cesarians’ mesmerising debut single ‘Fresh Is Grass/Woman’ cuts deep with lashing lyrics of cautionary tales of doom and despondency for the Modern World’s thoughts, philosophies and philistines. Featuring ex-members of Penthouse, Monkey Island and Baadar Meinhoff, the London-based quintet have produced a modern day musical acronym, dripping with early Eastern European gypsy decadence.

‘Fresh Is Grass’ opens surreptitiously, tip-toeing daintily with A Nightmare Before Christmas innocents, before splitting viciously into a cacophonous chorus of marching band throttling chords. At this point the lyrics appear superfluous to the musical depiction of what is painted, but do nothing but add to the innocents and fear that floats rhythmically in the manner of Patrick Wolf ripping up the Phantom of the Opera and starting again with lustrous zeal. ‘Woman’ starts where its procreation left off: sounds of brass instrumentals crashing like thunder backed up with a driving bass line unravels nonchalantly into Charlie Finke’s Tom Waits-esque vocal, flaunting lies, honesty and deviance. The result is dramatic: a melodic musing of bludgeoned textures of musical wit that a young Nick Cave would have been proud of.

Thomas Ward, Gigwise Webzine

 http://www.gigwise.com/contents.asp?contentid=40352


This is simply stunning. Featuring ex members of Penthouse, Monkey Island and Baadar Meinhoff, London based quintet the Cesarians are quite possibly just what the doctor ordered in an attempt to shake you from your post Christmas blues. ’Flesh is Grass’ is literally drowning amid a deliriously macabre music hall setting, like some kind of travelling freak show its retells of cautionary doomed tales awash with a cloaking grandeur that’s all at once evocative, dark and raging - slickly draped within sinew straining dramatic effects this melodic mausoleum bites and scratches braided between classically calibrated 30’s Weimar motifs and the stark oppressive shadowy emblems of a Tim Burton animation, the tip toeing creepiness of the piano and clarinet upping the sense of trepidation a la Nyman’s sweeping corteges on ’the draughtsman’s contract’ shifting the carnival sound to its anticipated thunderstruck climatic finale - to be filed alongside the post Soft Cell work of Marc Almond (with the Mambas), the darker moments of Baby Bird and Cathal Coughlan. ’Woman’ over on the flip though admittedly less mercurial in terms of texture and atmospherics still provides for a cauldron brew, a howling spite ridden fest of bludgeoned blues boogie that again recalls in the main Coughlan’s unwavering rage in his post Micro Disney combo the Fatima Mansions but this time wrapped in the claustrophobic grip of early career Bad Seeds, throw in some neat lines of Tom Waits -and Bob’s your uncle.

Mark Barton, Losing Today

 http://www.losingtoday.com/tales.php?id=180


It is 1928 in Germany. Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht have just seen their ‘Threepenny Opera’ performed for the first time and are out celebrating in an empty, run-down bar on the Berlin Alexanderplatz. Weill jubilantly pounds a ramshackle, old piano at one side of the room, while across the broken boards of the bar’s long wooden floor Brecht is getting noisily drunk with his two new friends, Nick Cave and Iggy Pop, both of whom have been magically transported back in time from fronting the Birthday Party and the Stooges.

Abandoning guitars and replacing them with a motley assortment of pawn shop instrumentation, ‘Flesh is Grass’, the debut single of London quintet the Cesarians, takes the music of the Weimar Republic and then up-dates it with primitive rock beats. It is a cacophonic, but colourful jumble of sound which merges a stabbing piano with a shrill clarinet, and a slithering xylophone and trombone with high-pitched drum beats.

Vocalist Charlie Finke tells with teeth-disintegrating anguish and gusto of a life only rescued from a succession of disasters by a final, flesh-rotting descent into the grave. He has a love of pretentious, nonsensical lyrics (“All human fears roll out of truth/She has hyenas go and let ‘em loose” and “To pierce the skin and look inside/The madness leers and off we slide”) and the thought that he is not just hamming things up for all they are worth, but laughing at himself in the process is confirmed on the B side, ‘Woman’, a somewhat more conventional eruption of pounding rock rhythms and exaggerated pumped-up brass, across which he howls “I want to be a girl/I want to be a woman/I want to have a brain and a question to chew on.”

A debut record of great creativity which merges the epic and the intimate, the sublime and the ridiculous, and the old with the new.

John Clarkson, Pennyblack Music

http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Review.aspx?id=5699


Imagine Sally Bowles writhing about as frontperson of the Bad Seeds, or Nick Cave belting out Brecht and Weill numbers on a cabaret stage in Weimar Germany. ‘Flesh is Grass’ raises the ghosts of Middle-Europe and the apocalypse-approaching 1930s, incanting similar spells to those of the magnificent Indelicates or The Mules. The dark theatrical imagery of the song is accompanied by crashing piano and what sounds like an orchestra’s woodwind section, creating something memorably vivid from old fashioned ingredients (the whole experience feels like it should be framed by an RKO Pictures logo at the start and a list of credits including Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre at the end). In contrast, on ‘Woman’ the Cesarians are at home to Dr Rock again. The Bad Seeds comparison fits the dark and bluesy guitar sound as singer Charlie Finke (the ex-Penthouse warbler) declares that he variously wants to be “the ball in a 9-goal thriller”, a killer’s knife and a girl/woman. Both unusual and intriguing, the whole thing leaves you wanting to hear much more.

Ged McAlea, SoundsXP