Cesar Sun - The Palace

  

Cesar Sun - The Palace
Self-released – 2026
Rock, Stoner, Punk
Rated: *****

Wow. Wow. WOW!!! There are debut albums that leave a lasting impression. There are also the ones that radiate with hellish joy and hit your skull with a concrete brick. And then there's 'The Palace' by Cesar Sun, a young band from Ghent, Belgium, that ties you to a pole just to run you over while driving a revved-up tank at 100 miles per hour. This is the real shit people. The kind that feeds you razorblades for breakfast and rips the fuzz from your guts.

The intro 'Easy Come' starts with subdued speech before the rope gets payed out, serving energy on a bed of tension before the chest gets pumped up and ripped open with the first real song 'Where Is The Wine?', a belter of gargantuous proportions that displays the utter desperation when one runs out of a certain type of liquid at an inappropriate time. And man, those vocals! It's hard to put into words how they sound, but they're phenomenal with the perfect balance between emotion and power.

Even though the whole album pays homage to the church of rock and its complacent aggression, there are also moments where the gas pedal gets some relief. A great example are the verses in 'Paradies' (the German word for paradise) that form a stark contrast to the chorus and makes the latter blast even harder than it already does. In the jumpy and diverse 'Backwards Overbender' the title appears out of nowhere in whispering form before things get back to the nitty gritty of kicking the shit out of you. And there we've got the key word to this splendid album: diversity. Because the sound of Cesar Sun is all over the place, borrowing from lots of styles while staying coherent all the way through.

Take - for example - the punk influences that spice up 'Piss In Peace' and 'The Line'. Or the way they appear to enter the night shop at some point asking (again) where the wine is before they settle for almost one minute of furious doom, leading to the conclusion the shop might be all sold out in that department. 'Tunacan' is more straight forward and has the line 'you need more money to need more money' ringing in your head for an elongated period of time. It all leads up to the final song 'Easy Go' that shows their most sensitive side during the first one and a half minute, after which elements of postrock are added until the last chord fades out into something that can be called a quiet emptiness, a place where your feelings (that have been so thoroughly tested) are echoing in the large halls of an empty palace, totally in sync with what you've heard the past 24 minutes.

(Written by Ronny Dijksterhuis)

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