Cargo Records

Flesh Is Grass

Vocalist Charlie Finke was the singer in Penthouse many moons ago. Looking like a band formed in the mind of Geoge Grosz, The Cesarians capture the urban zeitgeist via the junk shop instruments of old Europe.
In their hands, a clarinet, trombone, piano, and drums beaten in waltz time, make raw and raucous rock and roll. Not since The Birthday Party crashed and burned in Berlin, have the twisted sounds of old style decadence been pumped so intensely through distorted amplifiers.

London scenesters looking for a scene free of recycled rock, have found expression in The Cesarians cabaret world. Having just completed a tour of Italy Spain and Benelux, The Cesarians are now targeting the UK.

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.

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