Despite being a mid level Swedish super group of sorts featuring former and current members of the likes of Nominon, Just Before Dawn and Killaman, Puteraeon have never really registered with me. I have a vague recollection of their 2011 debut, The Esoteric Order, but I neither own it or really remember much about it, and being the die hard Swedish death metal fan that I am, that does not bode well for its quality.  And I never even heard 2012s Cult Cthulhu.

But here we are with album number three, The Crawling Chaos and it is kicking my ass and sitting atop 2014s best old school Swedish death metal releases amid Brutally Deceased and Just Before Dawn.

Make no mistake, this is pure Grave/Entombed/Dismember worship (I actually thought “Path to Oblivion” was a  cover of Dismember’s “Under a Bloodred Sky”), nothing more, nothing less. But armed with a fucking killer mid range/Sunlight guitar tone that rivals the recent Brutally Deceased tone and a perfect grasp of groove and melody, the album just clicks perfectly at what it sets out to be.

Where as Brutally Deceased and another decent recent release by Incarnated in the same style are more focused all wall of guitar blasts and salvos, Puteraeon takes the more Rogga Johansson approach, though not quite as simplistic and deliver more catchy, crunchy and groovy riffs which allow the beefy guitar tone to breathe much more, even featuring a number of much slower, almost doomy passages befitting the Lovecraftian lyrics.

Opener “Wrath” start the album with one such passage, a huge, cavernous crawl before eventually delivering a simply classic Swedish death metal canter at around 3:55 that will have you breaking things in your chosen listening environment. That crunch and canter is featured heavily on most of the albums 10 tracks (“Path the Oblivion”, “Pickman’s Model”, “The Crawling Chaos”) littered with some killer slower  and mid paced lopes (“In Dreamdead Sleep”, the Autopsy hued start of “From the Ethereal Vortex”, monstrous “Asenath”) and a few urgent gallops (“The Abyssal”, “Rotten Aeon”).

The album ends as it starts, with a huge, steady, slow crawl in “Welcome Death”. On top of the band’s grasp of the genre’s sound and tone, these guys know about song placement as well and the end result is an improved effort and one of the better examples of the suddenly saturated genre I’ve heard since the likes of Entrails, Demonical, Blood Mortized and the recent Brutally Deceased effort.

[Visit the band's website]

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