Cesarians - Flesh is Grass

  by John Clarkson

published: 12 / 2 / 2008

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Review

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.

Track Listing:-

1 Flesh Is Grass
2 Woman