Red Rum – ‘Book Of Legends’ (2023)
Rating: 7.3
Release: 14 April 2023
Label: Trollzorn
Red Rum are a young pirate metal formation which has been active for the latest 12 years. Coming from United Kingdom they bring us our new album after a full length in 2015 and a more recent EP released in. Their music’s style can be recognized at first by just having a look at the band and song names – they play pirate/folk metal, but this album is also filled with some very good heavy metal moments which in my opinion are the most interesting parts of this work.
As we dive into the songs we can find some pirate metal Italian poet Dante Alighieri would’ve described with its famous formula “neither infamy nor praise”. Nothing too striking but it’ll still please the not-so-exigent folk metal enjoyer. Lyrics are another worth discussing part: sometimes they follow pirate metal’s standard formulas like in the 2nd track while other times they get more interesting. The 3rd song for example is filled with rhymes and a closer look will reveal that they do not just stop to the same commonplace “gimme your rum and drink”.
The band, anyways, manages to find great ideas for their songs, such as what happens in “liar’s dice”, which is definitely not the usual pirate metal song but it develops into something more complex than usual and yet very catchy, also through the help of folk and heavy parts. These two are the biggest potentials this band shows us throughout the album, while in my opinion the band can’t help becoming kinda generic into the pirate-inspired sections.
This, and guitar’s recording quality sounding a bit too harsh that could probably have been improved, are the greatest flaws of this album which, overall, is definitely not bad at all. My favorite tracks are 3rd and 5th one. And as I told at the beginning, this album’s not going to change pirate metal’s world, but I’m sure more than a listener will surely have a great time listening to these two songs I enjoyed and to the majority of this album’s performance as well.
Tracklist
- Book Of Legends
- Drunk And Disorderly
- 50 Gallons Of Ale
- We Pirates
- Liar’s Dice
- Greatest Drink (In All The Land)
- Rekt
- Captains Command
- Drunken Pirates (Ahoy!)
- Make Port Drink Port