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Pirate metal is the weird and weirdly popular off-shoot of folk metal, which is often just as strange. Lagerstein are by far Australia’s sharpest and wildest exponents at this caper and this DVD shows them in all their swashbuckling glory in front of a large and rowdy crowd.
Decked out in their pirate garb, swaggering around a stage kitted out as a pirate ship, singing songs about the pirate life – which mostly seems to entail drinking copious amounts of either beer or rum – Lagerstein is a fun and tight band whose rousing form of theatrical entertainment makes for a lively spectacle.
The keys and fiddle swirl through every track while the melodic vocals of Captain Gregaaarrr weave humourous tales of hard-drinking shenanigans on the high seas, the super-slick multi-camera production capturing the band from every angle as they incite shoeys, invite punters on stage for beer bongs and stir the mosh with their wildly catchy folk metal.
Live in Brisbane shows how easy it would be get swept along in the atmosphere of a Lagerstein gig, the authenticity and sheer enthusiasm of their delivery making up for their style-over-substance approach. It’s sometimes hard to pick one accordian-laced oom-pah-pah sea-shanty like anthem from another and sometimes where one ends and another begins, and as fun and giddily rowdy as this is, it does start to wear a bit thin as it ticks past an hour and a half in length – well past the point where most people a likely to stick with the joke. That said, this is extremely well-made and well-played, vivacious fun, but perhaps just a little too much of a good thing.
