Finally a glimpse of summer here in Helsinki, when for the second night in a row we found ourselves at On The Rocks, on June 1st, 2025, the occasion being the first Finnish show of US “fantasy doom” metallers CASTLE RAT, who landed here after their show at the Swedish Muskelrock festival.
Part of their extensive European tour promoting their debut record “Into The Realm” – a second album is already scheduled to be released in the autumn (so we might expect to see them again perhaps at a summer festival in 2026?) – tonight they were supported by a band we are well-acquainted with: MANSION.
At the beginning, the venue was still quite empty, but soon people began flowing in, so eventually, by the time the opener began their show, there was already a pretty decent crowd. MANSION has been rather active live as of lately, and they have honed their set based on their two releases. While some people in the audience were not very familiar with the Turku-based band, there were clearly some devoted fans as well, chanting along and banging their heads as Mother Alma preached the kartanoist teachings and admonished everyone for their sins. Always a pleasure to the see these guys perform live, although to be completely honest we would have expected something a bit different as a warm-up act for a band like CASTLE RAT, which in terms of live show theatricals is like the doom equivalent of GLORYHAMMER, in an equally geeky way, but more about wizards and potions and medieval fantasy lore, deeply rooted in the more traditional ’80s imagery that many of us metalheads are fond of, than all that weird Scottish power metal magic/sci-fi extended universe. To sum it up: Wizard music!
Of course there is much more to it, as the young band lead by The Rat Queen delivered some well-executed good old-school doom that brought back several nostalgic memories, and a show rich of entertainment from start to finish: from the story of how the lead guitarist The Count (now played by Franco Vittore) was killed by the scythe-weilding, latex wearing evil creature The Rat Reaperess, and then given a potion provided by The Plague Doctor (bass) he came back to life as a vampire; or the continuous fight to expand and protect “The Realm” precisely from foes such as the aforementioned The Rat Reaperess, or “Death Herself,” which later had a fight with the frontwoman in which the former appeared to be defeated, only to come back and kill our heroine which in turn was later brought back to life once again by The Plague Doctor as well… (yes, there was a lot going on – and everything was happening in front of the watchful eyes of The All-Seeing Druid behind the drums).
The set lasted a bit short of one hour, including the encore, but it felt like it flew by way too quickly, and it was really fun to follow everything going on and enjoy some good music at the same time. Hard to find a better way to spend a Sunday evening, and after a show like this, we are nearly certain we will see these guys again. As we already mentioned, their sophomore album is just around the corner, so the wait might not be long after all!
MANSION
CASTLE RAT
