Review Summary: Castle Rat’s theater kid doom gets a considerable upgrade
Having taken a tentative first step with 2024’s embryonic Into The Realm, Castle Rat delivers a full proof of concept just a year later with The Bestiary. As indicated by the album’s forty-eight minute length greatly eclipsing the debut’s thirty-two, it serves to expand the group’s occult doom theatrics and featuring a similar layout of punchy songs and periodically sprinkled in interludes. Of course, offering more of the same to such a degree can raise the question of how much the formula has improved in the process.
You can certainly hear more confidence in the band’s playing, especially when it’s boosted by a more powerful production job. The drums benefit the most from this with a booming presence and harder hitting beats that recall The Sword at their most pummeling. The guitars and bass have more weight behind them as well, mixing atmospheric fuzz and grime with a more defined ebb and flow. The vocals retain their airy veneer with an admittedly limited alto range but the echoes feel decidedly more coherent.
The songwriting also repeats the sort of scattered structuring seen on the debut, but the longer duration helps the overall package feel more committed. The dynamics are more thoroughly defined compared to the almost shyness seen before and the band is less afraid to spend more time dwelling on a particular mood. Of course, there are still moments where the connective tissue between tracks could’ve been filled in better (why doesn’t the prelude “Phoenix I: Ardent” fade directly into “Wolf I: Tooth & Blade?) and having thirteen tracks to work with can feel like a lot after a while.
It helps that the individual songs come out a lot more substantial this time around. There’s certainly been an effort to make the riffs catchier as songs like “Wizard: Crystal Heart,” “Siren: The Pull of Promise,” and “Serpent: Coiled Figure” assert themselves with groovy thrusts while the swirling waltzes on “Unicorn: Carnage and Ice” and “Dragon: Lord Of The Sky” pack in some solid oomph. I can also appreciate how the ominous acoustics that define tracks like “Crystal Cave: Enshrined” and “Wolf II: Celestial Beast” provide some extra color, especially with the latter’s mellotron.
As somebody who considered Into The Realm to be an ‘almost there’ album, it’s great to see how much Castle Rat has progressed with The Bestiary. Granted the band’s theater doom may still have a couple more kinks to iron out as the overall presentation feels like the sort of thing that’s better conveyed live. I find myself hoping that the future provides more overt earworms ala Green Lung or Lucifer; might as well lean in if certain circles are already deeming them sellouts, right? In the meantime, anybody curious about the Castle Rat hubbub can consider this a good starting point.
