Alestorm: Back Through Time

Alestorm's newest album begins with the words “Captain, there be vikings off the Starboard bow!” This tells you a lot of what you need to know about the band.

Describing themselves as 'Scottish Pirate Metal', they clearly revel in everything this represents, lashing out song after song about wenches, piracy, and of course, drinking copious amounts of rum. However, come their third album, questions have to be raised. Surely there's only so much you can say about pirates and rum.

The start of the album definitely offers something new at least, the title track Back Through Time being a song about time-travelling pirates are at war with Vikings. The band has great fun with this premise, violently shouting about impotent Viking deities and the power of 'cannons and whores'. The song's frantic pace is strange for an opening track, but conveys the band's excitement, and it's hard not to be swept along with this crusade.

After the weirdness with which the album begins however, 'Shipwrecked' seems to serve as a reassertion of the band's core pirate values. If you had begun listening to Alestorm without knowing it was about pirates, you would definitely now know, the song containing shouting about stormy seas and rum. Just as the theme is similar, so too is the music, and you can hear Alestorm settling back into a familiar groove. It's nice to know that they can still do what they do best, but it doesn't do much to alleviate fears about the music becoming stale and homogenous.

The following track 'The Sunk'n Norwegian' is more interesting musically, with some nice little folk twiddles and a marvellously shouty chorus (an Alestorm speciality). Unfortunately, this is followed by 'Midget Saw', which is an incoherent mess. The subsequent 'Buckfast Powersmash' is another failure, its strange interlude and finale failing to make up for a lack of melody and a thoroughly unmemorable chorus. This decline seems to confirm any fears about Alestorm's limited lifespan, and at this point it appears certain that the band's time has at last run out.

However, 'Scraping the Barrel' not only provides depth of which I did not consider the band capable, but it is also an excellent track. Finally, Alestorm has recaptured the epic scale that breathed life into songs like 'Captain Morgan's Revenge' and that was so conspicuously absent from the album's first half. Despite its cynical message, 'Scraping the Barrel' offers hope that things might not be over yet.

The next track, the aptly titled 'Rum', also seems to highlight the shortage of material, the chorus simply being a chant of the eponymous alcohol. This impediment doesn't seem to do the song any harm however, as it contains twice the energy of anything in the first half. This is followed by 'Swashbuckled', another great track, the fanfares of which once again evoke the grandness of Alestorm's early successes, while the chorus's message of fighting “till we fall” is appropriate for the band's condition. The succeeding track 'Rumpelkombo' is unusually experimental for Alestorm, and they go on to cover Stan Rogers's 'Barrett's Privateers' in an attempt to connect to their folk roots.

The album's finale 'Death Throes of the Terrorsquid' is suitably epic, a wonderful blast of high-seas melodrama, featuring the strange and twisted voice of Abigail Williams' Ken Sorceron. By this point, we are sure that whatever it was that Alestorm had, it has yet to be extinguished. For all of their concessions about the limits of their theme, if they can go on like this then they may indeed be sailing for many years to come.

If you enjoyed this album, you may also like wenches, rum and running wild.

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