YMMV / Alestorm

• Awesome Art: Their◊ album◊ covers◊ are each◊ as metal as the albums themselves!
• Awesome Music:
  • Their cover of 'You Are A Pirate!' from LazyTown
  • Their Pirate Metal version of "Flower Of Scotland.
  • All of Death Throes of the Terrorsquid, but particularly the spectacular Black Metal bridge about four minutes in (a Fan Nickname for it is "Dimmustorm").
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "Rumpelkombo". A 2 second "song" consisting of a quick lick of drums and guitars, before the band shouts the title, a few seconds of silence, then the next track begins. No explanation, just a small sting of random music, and the album continues.
  • And then there's the story behind the song. Apparently, at one point before they hit it big, Alestorm was on tour with Grave Digger, and at one point, their lead singer, Chris Boltendahl, called the band the title of the song, which translates from German to something along the lines of "rowdy bunch of idiots." Alestorm was not amused, so they wrote Rumpelkombo as a way to get back at Chris by crediting him with writing the lyrics, so that every time the song plays, he would be sent a penny in royalties to remind him of what he said.
• Bizarro Episode: The music video for "Magnetic North", a parody of Lady Gaga's music video for "Telephone" that has absolutely nothing to do with pirates and instead features a prison and wild west theme, intentionally crafted in a way that matches Lady Gaga's singing in said video, as shown by Christopher Bowes himself.
• Broken Base: Mild, but there. Since the band went Denser and Wackier, there's been arguments as to whether this is a good thing or not. A subset of metalheads think this direction means that the band has sold out and betrayed what made their more folk metal elements work in the first place, while another subset either doesn't mind the direction or thinks that it's an improvement. The band has even taken some self-deprecating shots at itself, such as Christopher Bowes commenting on YouTube videos that "Alestorm is shit now" and the band is terrible. (But at least there, it's clearly a joke.)
• Common Knowledge: Contrary to popular belief, the band don’t dress up as pirates for their live performances. They have occasionally done so for their music videos and promotional photoshoots, which may be the source of the misconception.
• Ending Fatigue: The title track from "Sunset on the Golden Age" is a little over eleven minutes long and features many, many false endings.
• Genre Turning Point: They weren't the first Pirate Metal band but they represented the point where the micro-genre within the Sub-Genre of Folk Metal became a much more prominent thing in heavy metal than during the heyday of Running Wild. Since then, Pirate Metal has gone on to become much more famous and a host of new bands playing this type of metal like Lagerstein, Swashbuckle, Red Rum, Rumahoy, and many others have sprung up in the wake of Alestorm re-inventing this style of music in the late 2000s.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A complaint about the band is that they lack variety in sounds and themes.
  • However on closer listen, the band's sound has changed noticeably over the years. The various member changes over the years, the addition of real strings, brass, accordions and other folk instruments from their second album onwards and the addition of harsh vocals upon Elliot Vernon joining the band all add up to a very noticeable difference, at least in musical style, between Captain Morgan's Revenge and Sunset On The Golden Age.
• Narm Charm: Yes, they dress up as pirates on-stage. The singer has an extremely cheesy pirate voice. It's awesome. Their songs range from pirate-themed ballads to epically silly songs with lyrics like:
  Hey! Hey! I want more wenches!
  Hey! Hey! More wenches and mead!
• Nightmare Fuel: In the middle of the Denser and Wackier Curse of the Crystal Coconut album they have "Chomp Chomp", a song about being eaten by crocodiles.
  Our captain was the first to go, he got ripped into shreds
  Still screaming as the alligator swallowed down his legs
  One by one the crew all died in several nasty ways
  The vision of that massacre still haunts me to this day
  • The video for "Keelhauled" features guitarist Dani Evans on the receiving end of the titular punishment, and it is quite gruesome. When the crew pulls him out of the water, his entire body is covered in black scars.
• Signature Song: Thanks to their gimmick and one-of-a-kind sound, a lot of the band's songs are fairly iconic, but "Keelhauled" and "You Are a Pirate" are probably their most recognizable pieces.

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