SWARM CHAIN ​​- Cernunnos

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• Bands:
  SWARM CHAIN
• Duration: 00:39:20
• Available from: 11/28/2025
• Label:

• Underground Symphony

Streaming not yet available

“Cernunnos” is the second album by the Piacenza-based Swarm Chain, a formation active since 2020 and dedicated to a mixture of doom (both in the traditional version and in the more epic or death metal versions) and gothic. The new work comes out on the Piedmontese label Underground Symphony and follows the line of the debut “Looming Darkness”, released in 2022 on Punishment 18 Records.
We are faced, as we said earlier, with the classic structure of an album relating to the macro-genre of doom: therefore, five long songs of seven minutes and more, entirely built on tempos between slow and cadenced, but without exacerbating everything with obsessive slowdowns in a funeral doom key.

The Emilian quintet rather bets on the melody and cleanliness of the sounds: this means that the death metal side is more than anything limited to the vocal performance of the singer Emanuele Cirilli, who is entrusted with all the screaming and growling parts, while the clean parts are delegated to the bassist Paolo Veluti, with the latter referring to the style of Johan Langquist's Candlemass in the most epic passages. In addition to the vocals, the links with the Swedish combo are evident especially in the more purely doom and slow riffs.
The main idea underlying Swarm Chain's musical proposal is also close to the British scene of the early nineties, when Peacevile Records launched the triad composed of Anathema, My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost, even if there are differences: in the Piacenza band the theatrical effect of the aforementioned trio is almost completely absent, which instead could count on a notable contribution of more characterizing aspects, such as female voices, keyboards, violins and orchestral sections.
This is clearly a point against the five tracks of “Cernunnos”, which are therefore a bit repetitive and not too original, given that the compositional system is exclusively composed of drums, voices, guitars and bass. Without a doubt, we pay a price in terms of influences to the transition period experienced by numerous bands of the early nineties, who went from death/doom sounds to gothic, a metamorphosis which in addition to the English scene also involved names coming from Scandinavia, such as Sentenced, Katatonia, Amorphis and Tiamat.

Another aspect that is partly missing is the sense of decadence and darkness, at the basis of all the productions of the golden age and yet lacking here, due to the production not being particularly dark and funereal.
What is less convincing, however, are some arrangements, unfortunately present in all the pieces, such as the use of boring and mechanical palm mute chords (“Cernunnos” and “Earth's Silent Secret”) or riffs that are too melodic, shrill and modern (“The Storm Within”); choices that are truly distant from the typical dictates of traditional doom which the group seems to be following.
The greatest emotionality emerges from the slowdowns supported by the growling, from the good arpeggiated sections, which manage to reveal a slight sense of sinister melancholy, and from the openings with clean singing, three characteristics which fortunately are found throughout the album.
Ultimately, Swarm Chain give the impression of being able to navigate the doom universe well, both when they use a more extreme voice and when they move on more classic textures, but, listening carefully to the album, you can't understand how much they really want to follow this path and how much they actually want to move towards a certain gothic metal.
The work done by the group in trying to create a concept album is ambitious, based on the figure of a primitive man called to relate to the forces of nature and the supernatural: each of the five songs on the album talks about a discovery linked to natural phenomena, which the protagonist encounters for the first time, such as water, fire, night.

In summary, “Cernunnos” gives us a band that knows its stuff with instruments, but which still lacks something in terms of originality to stand out and not pass off as a mere attempt to clone this or that album. We're always somewhere in the middle without making a clear choice between death, doom and gothic, an uncertainty that risks making everything seem a bit anonymous.
A more eerie atmosphere, a less clear sound and perhaps the inclusion of a keyboard to act as glue would help in terms of personality and majesty, in order to also convey a sadder, deeper and more suffering state of mind, a fundamental factor for the genre that Swarm Chain aspire to propose.