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This album is simply epic. Pirate themed, and pirate sounding folk/power metal. It’s very easy to hear why its called pirate metal, because aside from the lyrics, frontman Christopher Bowes does actually sound like I would imagine a pirate to sound if he was singing while working onboard his ship. Take out the metal and think about it, and I can see pirates sitting around a campfire on a beach, or in some grotty tavern, singing these very entertaining songs. The Pirates of the Caribbean films could have been sound tracked by this band had they been around when the first film came out.
There is hardly any power loss through these ten songs, not even with the slower paced Nancy the Tavern Wench and the acoustic Of Treasure. The only real down point is closing track Flower of Scotland, which I found to, after a few listens of Captain Morgan’s Revenge, become boring. It’s a cover song though so I can safely safe that all the original material gets full marks. I think that they only did this song because they are a Scottish band so it’s sort of a tribute. It’s the only song on this album which doesn’t actually sound very much like a pirate singing it though, which is something of a disappointment, since it's the entertainment value what makes Alestorm really great. If you want to talk technical then it would be a fair assessment to say that the vocals here are really bad by any other standards. But within this band, they rock!
The best songs here are easily the title track, Captain Morgan’s Revenge, which is one of the most epic metal songs that I’ve heard in a long time. The lyrics to this are the sort that just need a music video going with them although sadly there’s no sign of one on the horizon yet (pun intended). I can also imagine that it would be good music to drink to, given the common reference to beer or rum in the album. Over the Seas, Terror on the High Seas and Set Sail and Conquer are all just as good as the title track. The music is really infectious, as was evident when I went to see Opeth and Arch Enemy live some time back people were singing these songs in the venue bar.
To describe Captain Morgan’s Revenge in just a single word I would have to choose ‘fun.’ This is simply one of the best metal albums written in years. As said before it has only one downer in Flower of Scotland, for which I’m forced to deduct a point from the final score of this album. But in all honestly you can just ignore that song, it’s the other nine tracks that matter. Highly recommended for anyone looking for a metal album that offers up something a bit different from the norm, or indeed an excuse to drink or go plunder.
Will Alestorm last however? Standing the test of time is only one of the ways things could go from here, just two years on (at the time of writing) from the release of Captain Morgan’s Revenge. Already there are more bands that have the pirate theme but so far Alestorm remains, for me at least, the only one that brings any some sort of credibility to this pirate metal tag that's started floating around. The other way this whole thing could go would be to fade into obscurity, which I sometimes feel may be for the best before it gets overdone and spoilt.
(Review originally written for Heavy Metal Haven)