From its origins in the U.S. and Sweden in the late 80s and early 90s, death metal has remained a vibrant genre of extreme music. It has branched off in countless directions, and its signal characteristics have been spliced into other genres of music to good effect, giving rise to multiple sub-genres — and there’s no reason to think that evolutionary process will end.
But many of us still find ourselves periodically drawn back to the classic records of the old gods, which in the case of the Swedish school of death metal means those lethal technicians who stuck the word “chainsaw” into the parlance of death metal — the music of bands like Carnage, Nihilist, Unleashed, Entombed, Dismember, Grave, and Interment. For us, there’s something about that thick, downtuned, distorted riffing chained together with horror-show vocals that hits the old aural g-spot like almost nothing else.
Puteraeon is a Swedish death metal band whose members grew up listening to that music in the late 80s and early 90s and have completely embraced not only the sound, but also the ghoulish, corpse-littered lyrical focus. Their debut album, The Esoteric Order, doesn’t push the genre envelope, but their execution of old-school Swedish death is so damned well done that devotees of the genre (like us) will care little about that — because they’ll be too busy rocking’ the fuck out with this titanic dose of industrial grade skull-coring. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »
I’ve never been to the Bronx Zoo, though I have been to The Bronx. Did you know that in addition to being one of New York City’s five boroughs, The Bronx is also a separate county, with its own flag (shown to the right) and its own Latin motto, which translates to “Do not give way to evil”? Did you know that The Bronx was named after The Bronx River, which was itself named after 
