Bask The Turning Review

Bask

The Turning

Season Of Mist

2025

From the misty mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, the Heavy Psych/Americana/Heavy Blues outfit Bask return, weathered, unyielding, and ready to bend minds, with their fourth album, The Turning. This latest chapter is set to roll out later this month, prepared to shake bones and expand horizons in equal measure.

The album starts with “Chasm”, a drone that’s part Zeppelin’s “In The Light” and part Jane’s Addiction tuning session. Less a song than a beautiful intro that leads into the psychedelic, Middle-Eastern flavored beginning of “In The Heat Of The Dying Sun”. The song fakes left just at the moment where you prepare yourself for some Doors cum Tool vocal meandering and you are instead crushed by a pummeling metallic wave. The song wanders into a little Mastodon territory and then a little Neurosis territory and then off into a wash of head down, exotic thrashing.

The third song on the album comes on like a fat, horny Meat Puppets before stepping into a psychedelic sixties pastiche that could be the theme song to a British occultsploitation film and careens off into watery layers of ecstatic celebratory soaring before landing for some more Jane’s Addiction-esque guitar soloing that sounds like Navarro on the world’s most psychoactive opiates.

On the 4th song, “The Cloth” we find Bask treading into spaghetti doom scenery that gives way to Alice In Chains flavored grunge metal that metamorphoses into the shape of System Of A Down before dropping a ghostly banjo passage that lets the listener know that we might not be in Kansas anymore, but that this is a truly Americana themed adventure.

On “Dig My Heels” we get a Bask that flirts with a burly form of emo-country that is neither of those genres but the best part of both sounds still. This goddamn song is going to be stuck in my head forever. Midway through the song we careen into beatdown hardcore that drops off into lo-fi progressive folk jazz replete with pianos and steel guitars before returning with an attack that feels like an apocalyptic version of My Chemical Romance.

“Unwound” deals in chordal changes and dramatic pastiches that call similar era bands to my mind. Thursday, Braid, AFI even, but with an always maintained Baskness that is built into the instrumentation and the production. You sail through genre boundaries but never feel whiplash. You never forget that you’re listening to Bask.

“Long Lost Light” is beautiful and feels like The Avett Brothers and Isis spawned a sideproject.

“The Turning” begins as a space-prog Skynyrd anthem before going full Conan The Barbarian metal and then off into a stratosphere of decay.

This is black light poster music for the next generation. 

~Rev