DUSK RITUAL, With Rum, Skull and Crossbones (2005, demo)

The skull:
A clipart skull and crossbones on a parchment-looking background, with a few spots of blood. Or, I guess, really oddly colored rum. No, that doesn’t make any sense, unless maybe it’s some kind of rum cocktail with grenadine. But then, the title would have to be, at a minimum, With Rum, Mixers, Skull and Crossbones. So yeah, it’s probably blood. For whatever stupid piratical reason. In any case, the only cover art I could find was incredibly small, so it looks extra bad blown up to the not-especially-large standard to which we hew at BDS headquarters.

The music:
There’s really only room in the world for two pirate metal bands, and Dusk Ritual is unfortunately neither Running Wild nor Swashbuckle. Although, I guess I can’t say for certain that Dusk Ritual are actually a pirate metal band, since I can’t understand the lyrics or find them on the internet. The cover art and title are damning, however, even if the German bio on the Austrian band’s still-extant Myspace page (this 2005 demo is their only release, so one assumes this is just an abandoned online outpost of a forgotten band) seems to refer to them as “party metal”. A grim party, that. Musically, this is just crappy thrash-flavored melodic death metal, so it’s no wonder Dusk Ritual failed to light the world on fire. But, they were ahead of the pirate metal boom by a few years, and it’s not like Alestorm is any good, so maybe theirs is simply a case of being too far ahead of their time.
— Friar Johnsen