Keshan (Album 2022)

Swörn

Desert / Stoner Rock

Today’s fastest growing heavy rock fanbase might be the Desert / Stoner one. And so Italian’s scene around and apart the Heavy Psych imperium and formations like Ufomammut, Caronte and Prehistoric Pigs is broiling and pulsating. With the release of their self-titled debut in 2019, another outfit appeared on the map.

Like Tons, Swörn are hailing from Turin, the epicenter in Po valley. Three years after their first album, they present „Keshan“. Similar to IVK or Tape Shapes, the artwork by STRX shows ancient motives with a pyramid, guarded by Triceratops. On the peak, the Pharao hovers, while the sun and the moon rise simultaneously like in the „Goblin King“.

Swörn know how to build the dynamic they want. So the relaxed beginning with several voices gets cut with noisy guitars in „Tlaloc“, that features a marvelous headbanger part while „my brain melts off“. Somehow the music takes you to different universes, like in the next song, we hang on „Evil Ways“ in the Wild West.

Again there are eruptions of noise and a bass like from QOTSA ending in a Ritardando. „Stenbec“ pulls on the speed like Monster Magnet, running against a snow storm like Ötzi, smiling in a classic Rock costume, but with grinning grim of an old bastard storyteller.

The composition of „Rabarama“ reminds of Cadû, while the title is the name of an artist as well. Whispering and reverent like Wardruna, it comes to a concluding explosion and deadly silence. The „Black Manta Rising“ is a neat and tight intro for the „Heb-Sed“, the renewal of the king in the afterworld.

From Northern Italy sending you anyplace crazy as anywhere else imaginable, the three-piece Swörn knows how to Rock. Whether you are a supporter of primal Stoner like Savanah, Stoned Jesus or The Devil and The Almighty Blues or more Southern, Psychedelic or Progressive, this diversity might get you anyway.