Castle Rat – The Bestiary

Castle Rat – The Bestiary
Blues Funeral Recordings / King Volume Records – 2025
Rock, Metal, Doom, 
Rated: ****

Grabbing hold of their destiny and their momentum with all hands, Castle Rat follow up their debut album Into The Realm from April 2024 with a new fantastical metal compendium named The Bestiary. The Earth has barely made a full circle around the sun, but the four piece led by the Rat Queen are back with another monster of an album. Always on tour it seems, it’s crazy to think where they find the time to write all that new Medieval Fantasy metal material. But they do, and together with The Count, The Plague Doctor, and The Druid, they keep expanding their mythical universe. The Bestiary is filled with almost fifty minutes of metal, doom-rock, proto touches and with overtones of the theatrical. Which is of course also part of the stage personas and the overall image of all they do. But underneath all that cosplay, in its heart, they’ve got the tones, the riffs and the songs. Right? Well, The Bestiary bests Into The Realm on every aspect and with all the touring they do, this momentum will surely snowball into a beast all of its own. Quickly turning Castle Rat into a legendary monster, which you can boast about seeing in a run down bar in your home town before they blew up entirely. There is definitely that chance…  

As fifth track Unicorn commences the atmosphere already properly set by the Phoenix I intro track, beautiful single Wolf I, logical single Wizard and seductive Siren, you realize Castle Rat doesn’t need all the dress up theatrics, cause the songs have grown in to beasts themselves. On the other hand, perhaps, it is because of the universe they’ve created that it all works even better and everything comes together like clockwork. The ramble and steady tower building in Wizard, the wilding with thrash influences during Siren. It takes on a brighter hue if you’ve stepped through the closet door and into their fictional realm. But it’s mythical Unicorn that displays Castle Rat at their best. There is a slow weaving opening, where the guitar walks across the fabulous landscape and the Rat Queen displays all of her angelic vocal qualities, and as it builds, towards the break, you feel every hair start to stand on end, and you know this will turn into a truly enchanting track of epic proportions. The rondo turning into a tilt a whirl, nodding towards medieval times, while the overture ending becomes one of those of gigantic gestures. It’s dramatics put to music, the over the top take of what they do sharpened and perfected. And it sounds so delicious. And with the later Crystal Cave going full opera, it takes even that earlier feeling to a whole other level. Castle Rat is almost turning a symphonic corner there. And then when you realize the compendium works with magical chapters, there are bookmarks that help you revisit those most enchanting parts, and seeing them interact with different fragments, slowly turns the entire record into a prophesizing multi-quatrain. An oracle that seems to speak in cryptic verses as it talks about monsters and creatures and legends but hints it has seen more. That Castle Rat has stared into the sun for so long that the brightness burned universal truths and recurring themes into their soul…  And perhaps, this little screed seems over the top or appears to make only a little bit of sense. But just maybe, if you step into the realm Castle Rat has created in only three years’ time, well, just maybe… Everything will start to make sense… 

(Written by JK)

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