Music Banter - View Single Post - The Playlist of Life --- Trollheart's resurrected Journal

Trollheart · 10-08-2015, 01:14 PM

Back to the Noose --- Swashbuckle --- 2009 (Nuclear Blast)

Signed to a proper label, their first being an independent jaunt, Swashbuckle released a longer, much longer album upon us three years later. In total, we're looking at 21 tracks, though as with the debut, many of those are short instrumentals that bridge the gap between songs. It's again one of these that sets us off, as “Hoist the mainsail” gives us an acoustic guitar lullaby which then pumps up with fire and defiance and pulls us into “Scurvy back”, where the Admiral reaffirms his crew's commitment to causing carnage, as he roars ”Always ready for the attack/ We're bringing scurvy back!/ You'll have no time to flee/ There's only death at sea!” If the debut album was thrash, then this is thrash times three, with much faster riffs and powerful rhythms, but at this point we've lost Rowin' Joe overboard, so this crazy ship is crewed only by three now. Not that you'd notice, as Commodore Redrum plays guitar with the fury and intensity of two men.

The title track keeps up the madcap speed and the lyric is inspired: [i]”Kill for loot/ Now die in your boots!”[/] and ”Tell us world, are you scared?/ You'd better come fucking prepared!” The instrumental then is like something out of a cantina or something, something you'd expect four Mexicans to be playing while the patrons ignore them and knock back their tequila, and the title is enough to make me wet myself again: “Cloudy with a chance of piracy”. Oh, these guys! Then they barrel headlong into “We sunk your battleship”. I mean, the vocal is such a rapid-fire delivery now that it's impossible to know what Admiral Nobeard is singing, but the energy and enthusiasm is such that you don't really care. And before I can even look at the lyric sheet it's over and we're sharing “Rounds of rum”. Oh that's hilarious! In the previous song they were calling out the codes like in the game. You know, “B5! You sunk my battleship!” and so on. I love these guys. This one is a little more restrained --- only a little --- but no less fun.

“Rime of the haggard mariner” is something different. A sort accordion backing a narration by an old sea dog, with sound effects and I think a sailor's hornpipe going on. Then a kid says “Look mommy! A pirate ship!” and a cannon fires, and everything goes to hell as we power into “Cruise ship terror” as the pirates seem to time-jump and attack a cruise ship, exulting ”We are Swashbuckle! We sunk the Titanic!”

And a rousing chorus of “Yo ho!” into the bargain, a superb solo and a last roar of ”We stole your shit!” as they head off across the ocean, then everything stays fast and powerful for “No prey no pay” while “Splash'n'thrash” must be a favourite onstage with the lines ”Take a splash, it's time to thrash/ We steal all the cash/ Let's all splash while we thrash/ Stomp and mosh this piratical bash!” Oh yeah, these guys know how to have a good time.

“The grog box” is a great drinking song, which again must go down well live, then another little pirate jig in “The Tradewinds” before we come to the longest track on the album, with a total running time of ... forty-three seconds! Just kidding obviously, it's the shortest. Well, actually no, I lie there too, as “Whirlpit” is forty-two seconds long! “Attack!” is great though, and just goes for the throat with a real fuck-it mentality and the Admiral snorting like a boar for much of the short vocal, then we're all doing “The peg leg stomp”, ”Chillin' on the ship/ Swabbin' the poopdeck/ Suddenly have the urge to thrash and wreak your neck!” Ah, many's the time, me hearties, many's the time... “Whirlpit” invites the brave into the mosh pit, and at the speed they play this I reckon their might be some claims going in for whiplash! It's followed by another narrative like the earlier one, this being titled “All seemed fine until...” and leads into “It came from the deep!”

It's another mad fretfest and concerns a sea monster disturbed from its sleep, and it ain't happy. Listen to the final verse: "You pirates ruined my nap! /The world'll pay, because of your crap/ I will feast upon this human race /And bring devastation to this place!/ This planet I will devour and make make this your final hour/ Eternity in these watery crypts, hear my name:/ SHARKTOPUSCALYPSE!!!!!!!” And the pirates panic: ”HOLY SHIT! That be a giant! You son of a bitch!” as they are forced to abandon the sinking, wrecked ship, and find themselves “Shipwrecked” as the album comes to a close. What a fucking wild ride!

TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS

1. Hoist the mainsail
2. Scurvy back
3. Back to the noose
4. Cloudy with a chance of piracy
5. We sunk your battleship
6. Rounds of rum
7. Carnivale boat ride
8. Rime of the haggard mariner
9. Cruise ship terror
10. No prey no pay
11. La leyenda
12. Splash-n-thrash
13. The grog box
14. The Tradewinds
15. Attack!
16. Peg leg stomp
17. Whirlpit
18. All seemed fine until...
19. It came from the deep
20. Shipwrecked

I'm just falling in love with these guys! This is how Pirate Metal should be done, and it's only a pity that they have so few albums because I would listen to them all. It's just such immense fun. But we now come to their third and final proper album, though we will check out that EP as I promised later. Right now though, didn't your mother ever teach you that

Crime Always Pays --- Swashbuckle --- 2010 (Nuclear Blast)

Interestingly, I see they've cut the instrumentals down to a mere four on this album, with sixteen tracks in all, so that gives us twelve actual sung tracks. The opener is one of those four instrumentals, and it's really nice but I'm a touch disappointed that “We are the storm”, the first vocal track, doesn't address the apparent demise of the pirate ship from the previous album. The guys just come grinning and slashing (and thrashing) back from the dead, with no explanation. But hey ho, what can you expect? They made such a meal of their destruction though I had hoped there would be something like “The sea can't hold us, we're back” or something. Anyway, however they choose to explain or indeed not explain it, the crew of Swashbuckle are back terrorising the high seas as they love to, this time taking on geeks and video gameheads as the Admiral roars in glee ”You’re just another worthless fucking loser/ With praise of the hammer and your face all in paint/ Do you really believe you’re a warrior now?/ The only battle you’ve seen is on a computer screen!”

Then we're told in no uncertain terms “This round's on YOU!” as they roar ”Real pirates never pay to drink!” while the simple philosophy of ”Lift our cups! Blow shit up!” is the theme for “Powder keg” and a great “Yo ho ho!” chant into the bargain. Fuckin' A! “A time of wooden ships and iron men” delivers exactly what it promises, with a hard rockin' thrash metal fest as the boys sing ”Slashing and thrashing while the waves keep crashing/ This is where we belong!” Amen, brothers! There's even more thrash for your cash with the title track, then there's a sensitive love ballad in “Raw doggin' at the raw bar” (er, not quite...) and the female-friendly, PC material continues into “Gallows pole dancer” (you have to ask?) where I'm not quite sure if they intend it, but they quote Waits (yeah, you didn't think I'd get him into Metal Month, did ya? Shows what you know!) when they sing ”Set 'em up, she'll be knockin' em down”, an almost direct line from “New coat of paint” on The Heart of Saturday Night. Yeah, I'll shut up about that now and stick to piratey phrases, aaar me hearties!

Another nice instrumental before we're looking “At the bottom of a glass”, with a somewhat less manic pace but still a bellowed vocal from the Admiral, and in the same way as they diverged slightly from pirate times to verbally wedgie computer geeks, they now turn their wrath on identity theft in “To steal a life”, blaming those who are too stupid to safeguard their personal information and allow them to go no a spending spree. Obviously, this has a personal connection for me, as most of you know I was recently scammed out of three grand, so it's perhaps not as funny to me as it would be to someone who has not fallen victim to this crime. Mind you, it hurtles along at such speed it would be impossible to know what it's about if you hadn't the lyric to hand. I do notice that this time out most if not all of the lyrics are written by Commodore Redrum, and it has seen a cosmic shift in the subject matter, with a lot more “current” material and a perhaps slighly worrying tendency towards misogyny on this album.

Mind you, you can't take offence at “You bring the cannon, we'll bring the balls”, a sort of almost homage to Lizzy's “Thunder and lightning”, though a whole lot faster and more powerful, and there's glorious support for fatties in “Surf-n-turn (for piratical girth)” (where do they get these titles?) before we close once more on an instrumental, this one called perhaps prophetically “Rope's end”...

TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS

1. Slowly wept the sea
2. We are the storm
3. This round's on YOU!
4. Powder keg
5. Where victory is penned
6. Of hooks and hornswogglers
7. A time of wooden ships and iron men
8. Crime always pays
9. Raw doggin' at the raw bar
10. The gallows pole dancer
11. Legacy's allure
12. At the bottom of a glass
13. To steal a life
14. You bring the cannon, we'll bring the balls
15. Surf-n-turf (for piratical girth)
16. Rope's end

Although the lyrics have turned a little darker on some of the songs, this is still the band that made me cry with laughter on the first two albums, and it's pretty impossible not to like them. The instrumentals, though there are not as many this time around, show that while these guys can headbang and thrash with the best of them, they are perfectly capable of playing sedate music and are not just bashing their guitars and hoping notes come out. Like the pirates they sing about, it's not that they can only thrash, but that they choose to.

I doubt I'd have them any other way.

As promised then, before we leave these hilarious harbingers of harrying on the high seas, there is one more record we can check out. Not an album, and yet sometimes EPs can be as long as the full album; this time though we only have another four tracks to enjoy, a total of just over seven minutes.

We Hate the Sea --- Swashbuckle --- 2014 (Get This Right Records)

Aw, looks like Nuclear Blast dropped them. Or maybe they decided to go their own way; I'm assuming Get This Right is their own label. Anyway, as I say this is their first effort since 2010 and although I would hope there might maybe be an album on the way, a year later, nearly two? Doesn't look too good, does it, me shiverin' mateys? So we'll have to be having this to go on with for now.

Okay, well the speed level has increased, if that's possible, and sad to say, the women-hating lyrics are back as we open on “Beer goggles”, which I'm sure won't give you brainache trying to guess what it's about. It's depressingly bereft of any pirate imagery or references, so could be any thrash/death band singing about banging ugly women. Meh, not a good start guys, not a good start. At least the title track, robbed from The Simpsons, has pirate stuff in it, but why do they hate the sea? Bit incongruous. And it's only a minute long. Not much of the trademark bonhomie and good humour we've become used to there, and “Poop deck toilet wreck” is actually nothing more than them singing about having the squirts. Nothing funny there.

Ah, it's all too ridiculously fast and angry now. “Slaughter on international waters” references, I think, the “70,000 tons of metal” cruise organised for the last few years in Miami, and that's all very fine, but this band is going down the toilet with this release I'm sorry to say. If it's to be their last release, then maybe that's for the best and we can just remember them by three hilarious albums that are ten thousand times better than this shit.

I have a theory. It's probably wrong, but it's my theory and I'm gonna advance it. I feel that over the course of three albums Swashbuckle have, in addition to losing their label (perhaps because of the specialised nature of their music) become tired of playing Pirate Metal and now want to go in a more straight forward thrash direction, hence not only the title of this EP but the raw, unbridled, almost scary anger prevalent all through it. It's like they're saying “We've had our fun, you've had your fun, now fuck off! This is us from now on!” Maybe, after all, they do hate the sea and everything in it. But if so, it's a real pity because they're leaving behind some great and clever music and they may very well alienate the fans they laboured so hard to gather together, and who put them where they are today.

TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS

1. Beer goggles
2. I hate the sea (and everything in it)
3. Poop deck toilet wreck
4. Slaughter on international waters

Time, and the next album released, if any, will tell, but for now I have to say sorry guys, it's the yardarm at dawn for ye lads! Let me down badly, boys. Badly.

10-08-2015, 01:14 PM	#2845 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,996	Back to the Noose --- Swashbuckle --- 2009 (Nuclear Blast) Signed to a proper label, their first being an independent jaunt, Swashbuckle released a longer, much longer album upon us three years later. In total, we're looking at 21 tracks, though as with the debut, many of those are short instrumentals that bridge the gap between songs. It's again one of these that sets us off, as “Hoist the mainsail” gives us an acoustic guitar lullaby which then pumps up with fire and defiance and pulls us into “Scurvy back”, where the Admiral reaffirms his crew's commitment to causing carnage, as he roars ”Always ready for the attack/ We're bringing scurvy back!/ You'll have no time to flee/ There's only death at sea!” If the debut album was thrash, then this is thrash times three, with much faster riffs and powerful rhythms, but at this point we've lost Rowin' Joe overboard, so this crazy ship is crewed only by three now. Not that you'd notice, as Commodore Redrum plays guitar with the fury and intensity of two men. The title track keeps up the madcap speed and the lyric is inspired: [i]”Kill for loot/ Now die in your boots!”[/] and ”Tell us world, are you scared?/ You'd better come fucking prepared!” The instrumental then is like something out of a cantina or something, something you'd expect four Mexicans to be playing while the patrons ignore them and knock back their tequila, and the title is enough to make me wet myself again: “Cloudy with a chance of piracy”. Oh, these guys! Then they barrel headlong into “We sunk your battleship”. I mean, the vocal is such a rapid-fire delivery now that it's impossible to know what Admiral Nobeard is singing, but the energy and enthusiasm is such that you don't really care. And before I can even look at the lyric sheet it's over and we're sharing “Rounds of rum”. Oh that's hilarious! In the previous song they were calling out the codes like in the game. You know, “B5! You sunk my battleship!” and so on. I love these guys. This one is a little more restrained --- only a little --- but no less fun. “Rime of the haggard mariner” is something different. A sort accordion backing a narration by an old sea dog, with sound effects and I think a sailor's hornpipe going on. Then a kid says “Look mommy! A pirate ship!” and a cannon fires, and everything goes to hell as we power into “Cruise ship terror” as the pirates seem to time-jump and attack a cruise ship, exulting ”We are Swashbuckle! We sunk the Titanic!” And a rousing chorus of “Yo ho!” into the bargain, a superb solo and a last roar of ”We stole your shit!” as they head off across the ocean, then everything stays fast and powerful for “No prey no pay” while “Splash'n'thrash” must be a favourite onstage with the lines ”Take a splash, it's time to thrash/ We steal all the cash/ Let's all splash while we thrash/ Stomp and mosh this piratical bash!” Oh yeah, these guys know how to have a good time. “The grog box” is a great drinking song, which again must go down well live, then another little pirate jig in “The Tradewinds” before we come to the longest track on the album, with a total running time of ... forty-three seconds! Just kidding obviously, it's the shortest. Well, actually no, I lie there too, as “Whirlpit” is forty-two seconds long! “Attack!” is great though, and just goes for the throat with a real fuck-it mentality and the Admiral snorting like a boar for much of the short vocal, then we're all doing “The peg leg stomp”, ”Chillin' on the ship/ Swabbin' the poopdeck/ Suddenly have the urge to thrash and wreak your neck!” Ah, many's the time, me hearties, many's the time... “Whirlpit” invites the brave into the mosh pit, and at the speed they play this I reckon their might be some claims going in for whiplash! It's followed by another narrative like the earlier one, this being titled “All seemed fine until...” and leads into “It came from the deep!” It's another mad fretfest and concerns a sea monster disturbed from its sleep, and it ain't happy. Listen to the final verse: "You pirates ruined my nap! /The world'll pay, because of your crap/ I will feast upon this human race /And bring devastation to this place!/ This planet I will devour and make make this your final hour/ Eternity in these watery crypts, hear my name:/ SHARKTOPUSCALYPSE!!!!!!!” And the pirates panic: ”HOLY SHIT! That be a giant! You son of a bitch!” as they are forced to abandon the sinking, wrecked ship, and find themselves “Shipwrecked” as the album comes to a close. What a fucking wild ride! TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS 1. Hoist the mainsail 2. Scurvy back 3. Back to the noose 4. Cloudy with a chance of piracy 5. We sunk your battleship 6. Rounds of rum 7. Carnivale boat ride 8. Rime of the haggard mariner 9. Cruise ship terror 10. No prey no pay 11. La leyenda 12. Splash-n-thrash 13. The grog box 14. The Tradewinds 15. Attack! 16. Peg leg stomp 17. Whirlpit 18. All seemed fine until... 19. It came from the deep 20. Shipwrecked I'm just falling in love with these guys! This is how Pirate Metal should be done, and it's only a pity that they have so few albums because I would listen to them all. It's just such immense fun. But we now come to their third and final proper album, though we will check out that EP as I promised later. Right now though, didn't your mother ever teach you that Crime Always Pays --- Swashbuckle --- 2010 (Nuclear Blast) Interestingly, I see they've cut the instrumentals down to a mere four on this album, with sixteen tracks in all, so that gives us twelve actual sung tracks. The opener is one of those four instrumentals, and it's really nice but I'm a touch disappointed that “We are the storm”, the first vocal track, doesn't address the apparent demise of the pirate ship from the previous album. The guys just come grinning and slashing (and thrashing) back from the dead, with no explanation. But hey ho, what can you expect? They made such a meal of their destruction though I had hoped there would be something like “The sea can't hold us, we're back” or something. Anyway, however they choose to explain or indeed not explain it, the crew of Swashbuckle are back terrorising the high seas as they love to, this time taking on geeks and video gameheads as the Admiral roars in glee ”You’re just another worthless fucking loser/ With praise of the hammer and your face all in paint/ Do you really believe you’re a warrior now?/ The only battle you’ve seen is on a computer screen!” Then we're told in no uncertain terms “This round's on YOU!” as they roar ”Real pirates never pay to drink!” while the simple philosophy of ”Lift our cups! Blow shit up!” is the theme for “Powder keg” and a great “Yo ho ho!” chant into the bargain. Fuckin' A! “A time of wooden ships and iron men” delivers exactly what it promises, with a hard rockin' thrash metal fest as the boys sing ”Slashing and thrashing while the waves keep crashing/ This is where we belong!” Amen, brothers! There's even more thrash for your cash with the title track, then there's a sensitive love ballad in “Raw doggin' at the raw bar” (er, not quite...) and the female-friendly, PC material continues into “Gallows pole dancer” (you have to ask?) where I'm not quite sure if they intend it, but they quote Waits (yeah, you didn't think I'd get him into Metal Month, did ya? Shows what you know!) when they sing ”Set 'em up, she'll be knockin' em down”, an almost direct line from “New coat of paint” on The Heart of Saturday Night. Yeah, I'll shut up about that now and stick to piratey phrases, aaar me hearties! Another nice instrumental before we're looking “At the bottom of a glass”, with a somewhat less manic pace but still a bellowed vocal from the Admiral, and in the same way as they diverged slightly from pirate times to verbally wedgie computer geeks, they now turn their wrath on identity theft in “To steal a life”, blaming those who are too stupid to safeguard their personal information and allow them to go no a spending spree. Obviously, this has a personal connection for me, as most of you know I was recently scammed out of three grand, so it's perhaps not as funny to me as it would be to someone who has not fallen victim to this crime. Mind you, it hurtles along at such speed it would be impossible to know what it's about if you hadn't the lyric to hand. I do notice that this time out most if not all of the lyrics are written by Commodore Redrum, and it has seen a cosmic shift in the subject matter, with a lot more “current” material and a perhaps slighly worrying tendency towards misogyny on this album. Mind you, you can't take offence at “You bring the cannon, we'll bring the balls”, a sort of almost homage to Lizzy's “Thunder and lightning”, though a whole lot faster and more powerful, and there's glorious support for fatties in “Surf-n-turn (for piratical girth)” (where do they get these titles?) before we close once more on an instrumental, this one called perhaps prophetically “Rope's end”... TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS 1. Slowly wept the sea 2. We are the storm 3. This round's on YOU! 4. Powder keg 5. Where victory is penned 6. Of hooks and hornswogglers 7. A time of wooden ships and iron men 8. Crime always pays 9. Raw doggin' at the raw bar 10. The gallows pole dancer 11. Legacy's allure 12. At the bottom of a glass 13. To steal a life 14. You bring the cannon, we'll bring the balls 15. Surf-n-turf (for piratical girth) 16. Rope's end Although the lyrics have turned a little darker on some of the songs, this is still the band that made me cry with laughter on the first two albums, and it's pretty impossible not to like them. The instrumentals, though there are not as many this time around, show that while these guys can headbang and thrash with the best of them, they are perfectly capable of playing sedate music and are not just bashing their guitars and hoping notes come out. Like the pirates they sing about, it's not that they can only thrash, but that they choose to. I doubt I'd have them any other way. As promised then, before we leave these hilarious harbingers of harrying on the high seas, there is one more record we can check out. Not an album, and yet sometimes EPs can be as long as the full album; this time though we only have another four tracks to enjoy, a total of just over seven minutes. We Hate the Sea --- Swashbuckle --- 2014 (Get This Right Records) Aw, looks like Nuclear Blast dropped them. Or maybe they decided to go their own way; I'm assuming Get This Right is their own label. Anyway, as I say this is their first effort since 2010 and although I would hope there might maybe be an album on the way, a year later, nearly two? Doesn't look too good, does it, me shiverin' mateys? So we'll have to be having this to go on with for now. Okay, well the speed level has increased, if that's possible, and sad to say, the women-hating lyrics are back as we open on “Beer goggles”, which I'm sure won't give you brainache trying to guess what it's about. It's depressingly bereft of any pirate imagery or references, so could be any thrash/death band singing about banging ugly women. Meh, not a good start guys, not a good start. At least the title track, robbed from The Simpsons, has pirate stuff in it, but why do they hate the sea? Bit incongruous. And it's only a minute long. Not much of the trademark bonhomie and good humour we've become used to there, and “Poop deck toilet wreck” is actually nothing more than them singing about having the squirts. Nothing funny there. Ah, it's all too ridiculously fast and angry now. “Slaughter on international waters” references, I think, the “70,000 tons of metal” cruise organised for the last few years in Miami, and that's all very fine, but this band is going down the toilet with this release I'm sorry to say. If it's to be their last release, then maybe that's for the best and we can just remember them by three hilarious albums that are ten thousand times better than this shit. I have a theory. It's probably wrong, but it's my theory and I'm gonna advance it. I feel that over the course of three albums Swashbuckle have, in addition to losing their label (perhaps because of the specialised nature of their music) become tired of playing Pirate Metal and now want to go in a more straight forward thrash direction, hence not only the title of this EP but the raw, unbridled, almost scary anger prevalent all through it. It's like they're saying “We've had our fun, you've had your fun, now fuck off! This is us from now on!” Maybe, after all, they do hate the sea and everything in it. But if so, it's a real pity because they're leaving behind some great and clever music and they may very well alienate the fans they laboured so hard to gather together, and who put them where they are today. TRACKLISTING AND RATINGS 1. Beer goggles 2. I hate the sea (and everything in it) 3. Poop deck toilet wreck 4. Slaughter on international waters Time, and the next album released, if any, will tell, but for now I have to say sorry guys, it's the yardarm at dawn for ye lads! Let me down badly, boys. Badly. __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018