Review: Castle Rat – The Bestiary
“The Bestiary” feels like a storybook of beasts forged in metal and smoke. It’s a record of myth, fantasy, and heavy riffs meant to be read under torchlight. Castle Rat lean hard into their aesthetic: swords, creatures, legends, theatrical flair, and the strange balance between doom and play. It is music that feels both ancient and alive, built around ritual, rhythm, and performance. The album doesn’t just describe its world; it lives inside it, breathing smoke and dust into every chord.
“Wolf I” and “Wizard” open with galloping riffs and commanding vocals that establish both tone and intent. The guitars grind and shimmer with purpose, while the rhythm section keeps the structure rooted in primal power. Each song feels like a vignette in a fable, linked by a shared pulse of doom and melody. The vocals hovers between invocation and theatre, alternating between menace and melancholy. The early songs are alive with urgency, while the midsection leans into dreamlike interludes and strange, glowing calm.
“Crystal Cave” and “Unicorn” drift through moments of reflection, where riffs become landscapes and the pace drops to a slow burn. These quieter spaces allow the record to breathe, even if they sometimes lose direction. Yet they serve their purpose: to deepen the sense of immersion, to let the world of “The Bestiary” unfold rather than rush forward. When the tempo rises again, it feels earned, the heaviness returning like a tide.
The production gives the album its distinct texture. Guitars sit high in the mix, thick and tactile, the drums providing a solid backbone while vocals and leads snake around them. The low end is particularly strong, grounding the music’s wilder moments. Some passages blur under their own density, but that density also feels intentional, as if the band want the sound to feel as overgrown and shadowed as the imagery suggests. It is an atmosphere built not just through tone but through pacing and repetition, the sound of a myth told again and again until it becomes ritual.
“The Bestiary” works best when it embraces its scope without losing focus. The interplay of melody and heaviness, of worldbuilding and immediacy, makes it stand apart from simpler retro doom acts. Its minor flaws lie mostly in pacing, making a few songs linger too long or cover similar emotional ground. But even those moments carry a kind of charm, as if the band’s ambition refuses to be trimmed. This is metal that revels in its own fiction, not as escape but as expansion. It doesn’t mock its mythology; it feeds on it.
Castle Rat have built something striking in both sound and vision. “The Bestiary” feels alive, theatrical, sometimes messy, often magnificent. It’s a record that wears its obsessions proudly and builds a universe out of riffs and ritual.
