ALBUM REVIEW: A Pirate Stole My Christmas – Ye Banished Privateers
A Pirate Stole My Christmas is not a phrase you’d be accustomed to hearing whilst walking down cobbled, snow clung streets, the abundance of shopping bags severing the blood circulation to your hands as you whisper profanities under your breath at the hole quickly being burned in your pocket. For thousands of years though, the tall tales of the seven seas and the pirates that plagued them have been passed down for generations, scaring children at bedtime and leaving rebellious teenagers in awe. YE BANISHED PRIVATEERS however are here to steal our typical and corporate idea of what Christmas is with their festive 11-track album, A Pirate Stole My Christmas.
The Swedish swashbucklers take family classics and twist and torture them until they’re near unrecognisable, the eerie creak of floorboards and gusts of winds transporting you to the deathly chill of a Christmas aboard a ship entertaining the company of bloodthirsty pirates. Ring The Bells utters the threat of the gallows, the foreboding crackle of strained rope above the lapping shore as an innocent and shaky voice chimes: “Dashing through the foam, on a one mast leaking ship/Across the seas we roam, on a one-way plundered trip.”
Accordions break through the mist as panic ensues and a deepened, husky, salt-damaged voice splutters above the worrisome streets, almost as if Santa once lived an adventure-filled life more than one night a year in the 1700s. It Came To Bloody Pass incorporates a spoken-word fable, heeding a warning of the darkened depths and what travel along its surface in a manner not too dissimilar from IRON MAIDEN’s Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.
A confrontational and brawly climate exudes from the inside of a lively tavern as the lyrics for Twelve Days Of Christmas are interchanged for ships, rum, wooden legs, cannons and scurvy dogs, giving the 20-strong band members a chance to have at their part. With so many instruments and voices though, it can be a struggle to differentiate between the hurdy-gurdys over the top of lutes, violas over fiddles, and organs over harpsichords.
By the time Little Rummer Boy and Oh Cannonball roll around, the novelty wears off slightly. While a hilarious concept in itself, it doesn’t hold up on its own. The constant atmospheric background noise leans toward something a little more live-action based, the music being better suited as the score for a whole stage production to help move along the imagery. Thick accents and ye olde language means the continuity is hard to keep a track of without the help of a visual aid; there’s something that resembles a storyline but it’s not quite clear what that is.
Final track Away in the Gutter holds all of the stereotypes of a discarded, drunken, washed up captain, but unfortunately that also includes the near indecipherable and slurred lyrics leaving the record on a not very festive note. While it may not be replacing our much loved, albeit begrudgingly, MICHAEL BUBLÉ and MARIAH CAREY family favourites, A Pirate Stole My Christmas is a fun record to listen to the once. The nature of the record would be much better suited to a stage production all of its own; giving voices to the tavern wench, the drunken washed up captain, the scared and cowering skipper, and the treacherous ice burdened sea. The pirates may have stolen our Christmas, but they’re kind enough to give it back after having had their fun.
Rating: 7/10
A Pirate Stole My Christmas is set for release on December 3rd via Napalm Records.
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