This is the latest release from Ye Banished Privateers who are are a pirate band from Umea, Sweden. Their songs are inspired by traditional Irish and Scandinavian folk music and their lyrics are mostly based on events that happened in the 17th and 18th century. During their shows they portray a crew of pirates, wearing historical clothes and acting while playing, making the show itself a mix of music and theatre.
A Pirate Stole My Christmas is not a phrase you’d be accustomed to hearing whilst walking down cobbled, snow clung streets, the abundance of shopping bags severing the blood circulation to your hands as you whisper profanities under your breath at the hole quickly being burned in your pocket. For thousands of years though, the tall tales of the seven seas and the pirates that plagued them have been passed down for generations, scaring children at bedtime and leaving rebellious teenagers in awe. Ye Banished Privateers however are here to steal our typical and corporate idea of what Christmas is with their festive 11-track album, A Pirate Stole My Christmas.
The Swedish swashbucklers take family classics and twist and torture them until they’re near unrecognisable, the eerie creak of floorboards and gusts of winds transporting you to the deathly chill of a Christmas aboard a ship entertaining the company of bloodthirsty pirates. Ring The Bells utters the threat of the gallows, the foreboding crackle of strained rope above the lapping shore as an innocent and shaky voice chimes: “Dashing through the foam, on a one mast leaking ship/Across the seas we roam, on a one-way plunder trip.”
Accordions break through the mist as panic ensues and a deepened, husky, salt-damaged voice splutters above the worrisome streets, almost as if Santa once lived an adventure-filled life more than one night a year in the 1700s. It Came To Bloody Pass incorporates a spoken-word fable, heeding a warning of the darkened depths and what travel along its surface.
A confrontational and brawly climate exudes from the inside of a lively tavern as the lyrics for Twelve Days Of Christmas are interchanged for ships, rum, wooden legs, cannons and scurvy dogs, giving the 20-strong band members a chance to have at their part. With so many instruments and voices though, it can be a struggle to differentiate between the hurdy-gurdys over the top of lutes, violas over fiddles, and organs over harpsichords.
A Pirate Stole My Christmas is a fun record to listen to the once. The nature of the record would be much better suited to a stage production all of its own; giving voices to the tavern wench, the drunken washed up captain, the scared and cowering skipper, and the treacherous ice burdened sea. The pirates may have stolen our Christmas, but they’re kind enough to give it back after having had their fun.