Artist: Mausoleum Gate
Country: Finland
Label: Cruz Del Sur Music
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2025
Ever since Mausoleum Gate introduced themselves into the scene, they have made an impact. At first, it wasn’t even so much their music, but mainly their colourful and psychedelic album covers, demonic but… unusual. With their follow-up releases that odd presentation turned out to have became their trademark style. Also this latest offering, ‘Space, Rituals And Magick’ is another addition to that wild visual appearance. Yet, it is also an album that breaks an eight year silence and kind of marks the return of one of Heavy Metal’s most peculiar bands.
Not long after the release of ‘Into A Dark Divinity’ (2018) vocalist Veli-Pekka Varpula left the band, which at the time seemed to me as a rather difficult problem to deal with. Varpula had quite a distinctive vocal sound and undoubtedly left his mark on the music. When the band released the ‘The Demon Age Of Aquarius’ 7” single in 2019 I was really curious how the band solved the vocalist issue, but it turned out that these two songs were still older tracks with Varpula on vocal duties.
But now, with this third album, we are being offered the band’s second coming with new vocalist Jarno Saarinen. Although he was part of Elinkautinen and Argon I wasn’t able to find if he actually recorded with these two bands (that I was personally unaware of). But, judging from his performance on ‘Space, Rituals And Magick’ he definitely sounds as a well-rounded, confident and experienced vocalist. Not only does he makes a great fit in the music, I even dare to claim he’s an even better vocalist than his predecessor.
On a musical level, things haven’t really changed. If there’s anything to say when it comes to a comparison with the previous recordings it is that ‘Space, Rituals And Magick’ is yet another step in their journey of further perfecting their unique blend of Heavy Metal with … well, with basically anything that was great and hot between the 70’s and 80’s. For those who are not yet familiar with Mausoleum Gate, imagine yourself to take a rather rehearsal room with musicians from a wide range of different bands. Think of Jethro Tull, Pagan Altar, Count Raven, Burning Saviours, Warlord, Black Magick SS/Tarot and a lot of the more obscure bands from the NWOBHM movement like Legend, Dark Star or Quartz and more specifically Saracen, Sanctus and Marquis De Sade. The use of lots of unorthodox keyboards/organs, psychedelic elements, spacey electronics, heavy riffing and splendid vocals truly makes this one of the most unique bands ever to emerge in the last two decades or so. It’s incredibly catchy, and every track on the album is equally good. These six guys, more than ever the odd one out in the contemporary Heavy Metal scene, have delivered a magnificent record.
As previously was the case as well, it takes a good few spins before ‘Space, Rituals And Magick’ fully sinks in. Not because it is overly complicated music or because of all sorts of multi-layered sophisticated song writing, but it is truly such an album that keeps on getting better with each listen. With having this record on the turn table for at least fifteen or so times, I can confidently say that this is one of the my personal highlights of the year.
