UMUR
"Danse Macabre" is the debut full-length studio album by Danish, Aarhus based death metal act Baest. The album was released through Century Media Records in August 2018. Baest formed in 2015 under the Bæst monicker (which is Danish for Beast) but changed to the current band name in 2016. They released the "Marie Magdalene" EP in 2016.
Stylistically the material on "Danse Macabre" is old school death metal to the core. Morbid Angel influenced death metal with the guitar tone of Entombed is a pretty valid description of the band´s sound and it´s not a release where you´ll find many surprises. Baest know every old school death metal trick in the book, and use most of them with great success. These guys can play too and everything is performed with great skill and conviction. The growling vocals are deep and effectful, but a little one-dimensional and a few more intelligible phrases could have made the vocal part of the music more interesting.
One of the greatest assets of the album is the incredibly well sounding production, which is instrumental in presenting the material in the best possible way. The material are generally well written and relatively memorable and the quality is decent from the opening "Crosswhore" to the closing "Ego Te Absolvo". There are some parts which I feel drag a little ("Ego Te Absolvo" is for example a pretty long track which tend to drag) and which are less interesting than the best parts of the album ("Crosswhore" is an example of one of the highlights of the album), but "Danse Macabre" is overall a strong debut album by Baest and a 3.5 star (70%) rating is deserved.