Pirate Metal isn't a thing, but if it were it would have a weirdly patchy history; RUNNING WILD released "Under Jolly Rodger" in 1987, their first piratical offering and the scene (which doesn't exist) has been dormant until we were graced with ALESTORM and SWASHBUCKLE in the last decade. I don't want to sound bitter; I love all these bands. Having a sense of humour about something you love is important to Metal culture, and whilst ALESTORM might seem a touch too daft for some - Metalheads are a diverse bunch, after all - there's a sense of well-crafted humour at work rather than just a series of fart jokes. That said, Pirate Metal isn't a genre as such - all the bands have very distinct styles of music, with the pirate lyrics being simply an aside and not really enough to mark it out as a genre in its own respect.

If you want to get seriously geeky, the reason Pirate Metal isn't really a genre and something like Viking Metal is considered a 'real' category is that Viking mythology is rooted in the Scandinavian culture and thus expressed through Black Metal with bands like BURZUM and BATHORY - these bands also have a characterizing sound (galloping drums, use of ambience). Let us set petty genre classification aside though - what about LAGERSTEIN?

Sadly, there's not much to say here. LAGERSTEIN strike immediately as a Synth-heavy, vaguely folk-leaning novelty Metal band. There's a bit of Black Metal ambience here, but sadly the mixing is a bit off and it all sounds like a bit of a mess. The guitars do cut through the mix to provide something to cling to - otherwise this really would be a disaster. I was really put off by the vocals too - they seemed languid and powerless, even though his piratical narrator's voice is great.

The humour didn't connect with me at all. Even with multiple listens, whenever anything struck me as amusing - such as the second song about a flying pirate ship - the joke would be repeated to death until all joy was firmly sucked out of it. The two covers tacked on at the end - REEL BIG FISH's "Beer" and THE LONELY ISLAND's "I'm On A Boat", though pretty representative of the band's interests, are pretty lacklustre, the pirate synths drowning out the vocals on what could otherwise have been a passable Ska cover and the latter having nothing added to it by sounding a little angrier.

This band is clearly here to party over everything else, but sadly it comes at the grave price of musical quality. I feel they could be better if they worked on the Synth ambience more and went for a Black Metal feel rather than trying to fuse that with the folk elements. Ultimately, the humour misses the mark, the vocals are weak, the mixing is poor and the music is patchy. Go party elsewhere.