Vim Fuego A 12 year old boy can tell you anchor rhymes with wanker, but it took a swag of salty Scottish seamen to actually write a song about it. Celtic pirates singing sweary metal songs about drinking, pillaging, and sailing? It has to be Alestorm.

‘No Grave but the Sea’ carries straight on from where ‘Sunset on the Gold Age’ left off, in that it is an album chock full of tales of grog and girls and gallivanting, and the odd bit of pirating too. What is so surprising is that what a lot of people initially dismissed as a short lived novelty is still going. ‘No Grave but the Sea’ is Alestorm’s fifth album, and there is no sign of the It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise. After all, Running Wild have been pumping out piratical power metal since the mid 80s.

Surely no one can keep churning out such melodies forever? Well, it seems like Alestorm’s sole remaining founding member, vocalist and keytarist Christopher Bowes, can. His croaky faux-buccaneer voice produces melody after melody, and his fingers dance across his keytar in an involuntary tarantella.

As ever, the songs are just a bit mad, with a fine twist of silly anachronism thrown in. First song, the title track “No Grave but the Sea” is actually a serious historical account of the Battle of the Saintes, a naval encounter fought in the Caribbean, which forced France and Spain to give up any plans of invading Jamaica. Admiral Sir George Rodney smashed the French fleet through superior tactics, technology, and a little help from the weather. His fleet sent an estimated 3,000 of Admiral Comte de Grasse’s men to Davy Jones’ locker, and captured another 5,000 whilst losing less than 250 British sailors.

So what’s a thirsty privateer to do after such a mission? Not sail back to grotty old Scotland, that’s for sure! No, the good ship Alestorm set sail for “Mexico”, where the cactus grows, ale is free, and er… donkeys provide the entertainment. While in Mexico, it seems Captain Bowes found an odd device called a timecube, which proved the world is not round as first supposed, so then set sail "To The End Of The World". More nautical nuttiness ensues with “Bar Ünd Imbiss", “Pegleg Potion”, and the self-titled “Alestorm”, all odes to the demon drink. “Rage of the Pentahook” is a cautionary tale of a Paraguayan pirate with five hooks on his hand. And speaking of hands, “Man The Pumps” is a double entendre laden elegy to the dangers of excessive masturbation. Hands off boys, it’ll kill ya!

And the anchor/wanker rhyme? It comes from “Fucked With an Anchor”, which sees the poor protagonist cursed with coprolalia, thanks to a witch doctor’s voodoo curse. It makes him a little cross, as the chorus to the songs demonstrates: “Fuck! You! You're a fucking wanker/We're gonna punch you right in the balls/Fuck! You! With a fucking anchor/You're all cunts, so fuck you all!” The solution? Rectally applying a large device usually employed to prevent a ship from drifting at sea to said doctor. Sounds painful, but the song is more dangerous still. See, the melody and chorus of “Mexico” and “Alestorm” are as infectious as bubonic plague at a fifteenth century rat-fanciers convention, but there is no known cure for the “Fucked With an Anchor” earworm. The simple, expletive-laden refrain will still be banging around in your head days later, as the odd whimpered “fuck” or “wanker” inadvertently slips from your uncontrollable lips.

Alestorm’s brand of melodic folk/thrash metal is too lightweight for many purists, but fuck ‘em. Metal doesn’t always have to be about being the fastest or heaviest. Sometimes, the most scatterbrained story tellers are the most entertaining. Long may Alestorm sail the seas of silliness.

adg211288 It's been almost a decade since the self-described True Scottish Pirate Metal band known as Alestorm first made waves upon the seven seas of metal to exact some Captain Morgan's Revenge (2008). The waters have been perilous as they sailed their Black Sails at Midnight (2009) and many of Captain Christopher Bowes crew have gone overboard on their quest to bring their scurvy brand of metal to unsuspecting listeners everywhere. Wait, I may have that wrong, their quest may just be to drink all our beer and steal our rum and sing a few songs along the way. With long time member Dani Evans having jumped off the black ship Alestorm in 2015, the year 2017 has them sailing with a completely rotated crew except the captain, but he at least seems as set in his course as ever.

Through their many stops along to way to No Grave But the Sea (2017) the band have brandished their own brand of metal comedy across four albums, most recently going Back Through Time (2011) to observe a Sunset on the Golden Age (2014) where they walked the plank, drank a lot of mead from hell (and got a hangover), got hit in both knees by cannonballs and had both arms cut off by Samurai. Alestorm are a hard bunch to take seriously and with each album it becomes clearer that they don't really want anyone to, because this time they're off to Mexico for three margaritas and a taco, kick a wanker in the balls and fuck him with an anchor, brew some pegleg potion and oh yes, they drink a lot. Again. They also got a dog who challenged Bowes for the captaincy, won and deleted all the vocals on the album and replaced them with barking which is why there's also a version of the album with a No Grave But the Sea for Dogs bonus disc also included.

So, business as usual then!

Well perhaps not quite. Alestorm are an easy band to laugh at which can lead to not really paying attention to them as musicians, but they're not actually the bunch of swabs they appear to be and their sound underneath all the pirate and otherwise tongue-in-cheek lyrics has actually been evolving and skill as musicians improving this past ten years at sea. No Grave But the Sea feels even more different to their past work since there's less power metal guitar in there and even less of the thrashy riffs they'd had previously. It that sense it feels to be quite a stripped back album, though a new element I feel they have on this one is the addition of some metalcore style screams, which can be heard in their self-titled song, something which I'm surprised it's taken this band this long to do, a self-titled song that is. Of course this is all neither here nor there where an Alestorm album is concerned, because that's clearly not the point of their music. The point is for it to be fun and yep, it is. My point however is that despite their apparent efforts towards complete and utter pirate buffoonery, they're not actually one trick ponies. Maybe that should be monkeys.

With that said, I didn't personally enjoy this particular Alestorm voyage as much as some of their past ones. It's easy to sit and snigger at their (admittedly often immature) brand of humour and they can certainly write a good drinking song for when it's time to down a few flagons of ale (though none as good as the previous album's Drink), but they're five albums in now and the joke seems like it might be getting a bit past it's sell-by date. They're not becalmed just yet because tracks such as the title track, Mexico and Rage of the Pentahook are still pretty decent, but the title of their previous album may end up being prophetic. Maybe the sun has set on the Golden Age of Alestorm. One thing's for sure though, they won't be going quietly.

Kev Rowland

Somehow these guys have made it to their fifth studio album, still portraying ‘True Scottish Pirate Metal'. I was once asked by a mate if I wanted to go and see them play live, but I honestly couldn’t bring myself to do it, and I’ve been to see Gwar! The frustrating thing for me is that there are some interesting songs on the album, but do you really want to sit through ten songs about being a pirate? I love folk in all its forms, but there are only so many shanty-style numbers that one can sit through at one time. Someone also needs to have a conversation with keyboard player Elliot Vernon and suggest that not only he update the patches he is using, but also to never repeat the sounds he uses at the beginning of “Mexico” as they sound as if they have come from an Atari that someone has dragged up from somewhere.

These guys are having a laugh, of that there is no doubt, and they are making a career of it, but although I can see the appeal this really isn’t for me. That they know what they are doing, and that this has been well produced is never in doubt, it’s just that there are many more albums I would prefer to listen to.