ALESTORM has won the Hails and Horns 2012 reader picked album of the year! To celebrate, we’re featuring a track by track by the band, a special video, and our review of the album itself, enjoy! Keep it brutal!
CLICK HERE TO READ OUR REVIEW OF THE ALBUM
Track By Track – By The Band:
BACK THROUGH TIME
There’s nothing more ridiculous than the blind ignorant worship of vikings that’s prevalent among metalheads… so we thought we’d piss everyone off by writing a song about how vikings are all a bunch of douchebags. Needless to say, we’ve had our fair share of hatemail about this one, which we’ve pissed ourselves laughing reading. HEAVY METAL: SERIOUS BUSINESS. Oh yeah, and blastbeats. I love starting power metal albums with blastbeats. Bit of trivia: The pirate voice at the start of the song is provided by James Fogarty (Jaldaboath, ex-Meads of Asphodel).
SHIPWRECKED
Lets be honest; every album needs a 3 minute pop song to make the kids dance. So this is our one. It’s really fun to play live, especially the GET DRUNK OR DIE! breakdown in the middle. Lyrically and musically it’s a bunch of nonsense, but it’s all about the party.
THE SUNK’N NORWEGIAN
Back in 2009 when we toured the USA for the first time, we did a show at “Station 4″ in St Paul MN. After the show, some fans told us they owned their own bar called “The Sunkn Norwegian” over the border in Wisconsin, so we all jumped in a van and headed over there… needless to say, epic ridiculous drunken party ensued. We made a drunken promise to write a song about their bar, and we like to keep our drunken promises. So here we are today! Another class wee drinking song.
MIDGET SAW
One of my friends wrote these lyrics and sent them to me as a joke… naturally we used them and turned it into another ridiculous song. It’s about chopping a midget’s legs off because he kicked a monkey who had eaten some treasure. A perfectly sensible premise for a song, you’d agree. It starts off as the usual folk metal nonsense, then we ran out of ideas in the middle of the song, so we added a generic-as-fuck metalcore breakdown in the middle. It’s actually one of the more fun songs to play live! Might be my favourite on the album.
BUCKFAST POWERSMASH
Anyone who has been to Scotland or Ireland will know of the mythical and legendary drink BUCKFAST… more people in Glasgow are stabbed with broken buckfast bottles than with knives. That gives you an idea of the power of this jungle juice. So we thought we’d do an ode to this booze; I think it’s probably the silliest song on the entire album. I personally love the xylophone solo and the ending, which is actually the theme tune to the Children’s TV show “Chucklevision”. Look it up, you’ll shit brix.
SCRAPING THE BARREL
Here comes the schmaltzy ballad! The double meanings are running thick in this one, but I’ll leave that to you to decipher. I’m particularly proud of the lyrics of the second verse; recording them was so much fun. It’s amazing how much you can get into the spirit of things when you’re singing about something you actually care deeply about, instead of just fantasy stories about piartes 
. We’ve had a lot of negative press over the years, being called a Running Wild clone and all that shit. I just wanted to do a big FUCK YOU to all our haters, and tell them all to grow the fuck up. Life is too short to nit-pick over music.
RUM
This is a song about drinking rum. It is called Rum. The words to the chorus are “rum”. I don’t quite know what else there is to say about this one 
. Just for the record, we do like drinking things that aren’t rum sometimes. We’re big into cocktails these days.
SWASHBUCKLED
Ok, the only thing worse than the worship of vikings among metalheads, is the pirate metal fans who think there’s some rivalry between Alestorm and Swashbuckle, and if you like one you’re not allowed to like the other. The guys in Swashbuckle are our really good friends, and all of us love perpetuating this ridiculous myth that we hate each other. So hence this song about them all dying in nasty ways (their original drummer Mike “Captain Crashride” actually became a used car salesman for a while, hence that bizzare lyric about Hondas). Also, the end of the guitar solo was ripped off from the melody in Future World by Helloween. Piracy is fun!
RUMPELKOMBO
In 2009 we toured with the beekeeping metal band Grave Digger (seriously, all their songs are metaphors for bees and honey). They hated us. We’re a bunch of drunken party dudes, and they’re a bunch off grumpy old men who are sellouts who are only in it for the money, their singer Chris Boltendahl even refuses to talk to fans most of the time. Fuck him. He doesn’t even drink alcohol. So yeah in an interview after the tour, he complained about us and called us a “Rumpelkombo”, which roughly translates as “rowdy bunch of retards”. So we wrote this song in his honour. We claimed it was written by him, so every month when he gets his royalty statements in the mail, he’ll get 10 cents from alestorm, so he can never forget us .
BARRETS PRIVATEERS
This was actually Heri Joensen’s (Tyr vocalist) idea. We toured with them a lot a couple of years ago, and he really got me into this song. So we decided to cover it (the original is by Stan Rogers, legendary canadian folk singer). It’s really long and really complicated with bizzare time changes, but I think we pulled it off. Heri provides a fantastic solo on this one. He’s the most talented guitarist we’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.
DEATH THROES OF THE TERRORSQUID
The symphonic black metal one! We get a lot of people saying “oh man, you can tell the band has really matured in songwriting with this one!”, which is fucking hilarious, considering I wrote this song over 10 years ago when I was 14 years old, and only recently rediscovered it and turned it into an Alestorm song. It’s kindof a sequel to the song “Leviathan” from our 2nd album, in which the squid of doom finally gets killed. I love the black metal breakdown in the middle, nobody expects it, and it’s fucking intense. Those inhuman screams were provided by Ken Sorceron (of Abigail Williams fame), he’s a cool dude. I love playing this song live; we put loads of crazy vocal effects on to make it sound even more demonic. We’ll be shooting a music video for this one soon!
