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CASTLE RAT
The Bestiary

Blues Funeral Recordings / King Volume (2025)
Rating: 8/10

With its rather snowy frontage, The Bestiary is the second full-length album from female-fronted cult doom act Castle Rat. The Brooklyn, New York-based band’s 2024 debut Into The Realm, although bolstered by theatrical dynamics mostly from vocalist The Rat Queen (aka Riley Pinkerton), was pretty much standard but enchanting doom metal wrapped in a fog of mysticism. The same applies here as the clan march you through misty lands and magical lagoons to a soundtrack of psych-tinged witches as ‘Wolf I: Tooth & Blade’ rolls on a greasy riff.

Our mighty Rat Queen serenades us from her wooded lair like a siren wistfully enticing us to our fate: “Upon a trail forgotten, a beast before me passing, I glimpsed you in a life before, just as silver, quick and flashing”. For some reason the song prompts me to slap on cult 80s movie The Company Of Wolves as I smell the same Gothic wafts of dark fairyland as The Rat Queen haunts our dreams, seducing our minds with elegant vocal vapours of dread and foreboding. Alongside her a menagerie of masked musical ghouls conjure vibrant yet esoteric apparitions, riffs which heave and recoil like some Lovecraftian unnameable, while the drums and bass create ivy-clad walls of enclosing horror.

Just halfway through this opus I hear the improvement, immediately salivating over the already mildew soaked unnature of it all as ‘Wizard: Crystal Heart’ sluggishly nods to Black Sabbath yet with extra dollops of fuzz and distortion. ‘Siren: The Pull Of Promise’ absolutely hammers in the drum department, although vocally there’s a poppier sensibility. I’m still not entirely convinced by Riley Pinkerton’s alter-ego; it’s pure pantomime in league with, but lower down than Rosalie Cunningham (ex-Purson). Even so, the riffs continue to ooze like an alley of orcs stumbling over each other’s flab.

A majority of tracks boast the sort of titles that brim with nostalgic crackles and a scent of patchouli. ‘Unicorn: Carnage And Ice’, ‘Dragon: Lord Of The Sky’, ‘Serpent: Coiled Figure’ are as simple as their names suggest, the latter brace being standard rockers, but the strong wafts of nostalgia cannot be ignored as what is essentially fantasy doom metal swirls like autumnal smoke.

There are softer notes within the album, like instrumental ‘Path Of Moss’, and the combo has more of an eye for experimentation this time around too, ‘Crystal Cave: Enshrined’ being a delightful Goth sway, but it’s all about the Sabbath-esque thunder riffs and scorching solos, and the battle-ready attitudes.

Castle Rat are certainly hot on the heels of last year’s outing Into The Realm, but in spite of so little time in-between albums, The Bestiary is proof just how talented these guys are and the plateaus they explore within the doom metal framework.

Neil Arnold

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