Alestorm Take Down Kentish Town
Published
"Do you want a pirate ship, or do you want a seven-foot inflatable rubber duck?!"
Back together for the first time since their mammoth Trenches and Mead tour in 2010, it is always a pleasure to have these stalwarts of power metal in our city, and the baying crowd at the Kentish Town Forum made that abundantly clear.
As before, Alestorm opened the bill, and everyone’s favourite Perthshire pirates didn’t disappoint on the sold-out final leg of the tour, with a kraken(!) setlist with notable renditions of "Sunk’n Norwegian" and "Captain Morgan’s Revenge", very tongue-in-cheek asides, a yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Dark Fruit Strongbow. Oh and a seven-foot inflatable rubber duck, of course!
Svenska Hedning!
You would have thought it difficult for a crowd to sustain such vocal support not only through two 90-minute sets, but also throughout the interval, and indeed when drummer Hannes van Dahl emerged mounted on two gatling guns it was clear that the band were taken aback.
Launching immediately into a brutal performance of "Ghost Division", they responded in kind. Ever the showmen, they worked the crowd and the space perfectly, their set peaking in a glorious expulsion of energy with fan-favourite "Night Witches".
In a carefully curated setlist littered with friendly theatrics and set-ups, the highlight of the evening came when Joakim Brodén, the happiest man in metal, and was forced by a crowd- and band-backed coup to acquiesce to an incredibly rare bi-lingual performance of "Swedish Pagans" (a song not played live since their Art of War tour in 2009) in both English and Swedish.
COMMENTS
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These sound like a great fun! I am concerned why I have only now heard of their existence. Love the music video for "Drink" too.
