Ravencrown - Relive the Imagination (2025)

Country: Finland
Style: Gothic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2025
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

What better to kick off a new year than a Finnish gothic metal band that I haven't heard before? In fact, I don't believe I've heard anything by main man Markus Jussila before, either from Mournful Lines or Kituma. This may be a sort of continuation of the former, playing as often in rock territory as metal, but I won't know for sure without checking out that band, who apparently split in 2024. It just seems clear to me that this is driven by its keyboard melodies, even though it often chunks up with some guitar crunch. The vocals are clean and higher than I tend to expect for a male voice in a gothic band. Overall, I think it sits on the metal side of that ever tenuous boundary with rock but it wouldn't take much to shift it to the other side.

That foundation in melody is obvious immediately on the opener, From the Moment, and it rarely ceases to be the focus, remaining whatever else the band is doing. I say band, but it's Jussila doing everything except whatever guitarwork his Mournful Lines colleague Juha Tervo contributes. The final three songs play a little heavier, Will You? especially getting epic and My Sweet Serpentine a more traditional goth song with an unknown deeper voice joining in duet, but they're still built on melody. Dreams & Hearts opens like a pop song, down to some diva crooning from Jussila, but it's still built on melody. Even Loveless Pyre, which veers firmly into prog rock, is still built on melody.

That introduces two of my favourite angles to this album, but not the third, which is an unexpected steampunk flavour. I have no reason to believe that Jussila intended that specifically, especially as it isn't echoed in lyrics, but it's there rather often. It's there in Loveless Pyre when the keyboards mimic violins and bells that sound like clockwork. It's there in the filters on In Autumn's Embrace's intro which throw everything back to a previous era. And it's there in the opening to Sorrow, which sounds like a harpsichord. Of course, steampunk is more of an aesthetic in music than a genre and that isn't apparent, so take this paragraph how you will.

The first is that prog element in Loveless Pyre. It's the longest song on this album by far, six and a half minutes running a couple more than anything else here, most of the tracks done and dusted in a radio friendly three minutes or so. That allows it to have the longest and most substantial break into an instrumental section and that in turn allows it to get more versatile and inventive. Oddly, I wasn't convinced at all on a first listen, not being sure if I even liked half of it but loving the other half anyway. It does a heck of a lot and it keeps changing as it goes. A couple more listens and this one was my clear favourite.

The songs that sit behind it all show up late, maybe starting with Hollow Anyway but certainly with Zero. Hollow Anyway is slower and more sedate but it finds a strong groove and milks it well. Zero follows suit, adding an epic heaviness that Will You? matches. These two play like symphonic gothic metal and would benefit only from a full orchestra over Jussila's keyboard orchestrations, which I expect wasn't in the budget. They sound great to me and it's hard not to imagine them washing to shore like the waves on the cover art.

The closer is the most traditional gothic rock song on the album, My Sweet Serpentine, and I'd love to know who the guest voice is. Whoever it is sounds great but also sounds deep in the way that we tend to expect any goth rock frontman to sound when singing clean. It isn't merely the deep voice that plays traditionally, the whole drive of the song follows suit. It wouldn't stretch imagination to hear other Finnish gothic rock bands like HIM or the 69 Eyes covering this and it fitting in their set.

There are five or six songs in between Loveless Pyre and the driving songs at the end of the album but they're all worthwhile to varying degrees. I'm not much of a fan of the crooning on Dreams & Hearts but the hook is particularly strong and the guitar solo builds off it very well indeed. I only wish that solo had been longer. I Feel the Emptiness adds a Latin guitar feel, enough that Jussila could have sung it in Spanish and it would have felt natural. It features another effortless melody on the keyboards.

My biggest query about these songs in the middle is why Sorrow was given the single treatment, given that it was the only one and it's hardly the strongest song here. While I'd call out Loveless Pyre as the best song, it's clear to me that My Sweet Serpentine is the single. The only reason that I'm seeing why it wasn't chosen is that it may actually be an old Mournful Lines song redone here, so not new music in the strictest sense.

Whether it is or it isn't, Ravencrown are a decent new band to me for the new year, one to deepen the already deep pool of talent in Finland and add to their thriving gothic rock/metal scene. I will take all the good I can find in 2025 and I'm thankful it started out with my first album review of the year.