Bask

Bask have always sounded rooted in their own time and place, but on their long-awaited fourth album, The Turning, they take Heavy Americana to a whole new dimension. Still grounded in the natural-born sounds of Appalachia, The Turning straddles the cosmic and the country. This marks the first album to feature Jed Willis as an official member. Though it begins with its boots planted in rugged terrain, lead single “Dig My Heels” marches through kudzu-covered prog fields before soaring into the beyond, his pedal steel swirling like Milky Way colors. But The Turning isn’t just genre-spanning. It stretches across generations in man’s never-ending quest for immortality. The album’s spurred heroine is shaken by “The Traveller”. The story twists through self-referential mazes as star-crossed outlaws race against the changing seasons. But while out of this world, the dwellings on family, aging, death and rebirth hit close to home. Tracked just weeks before Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, “Long Lost Light” floats through a ghost town of saloon piano and high, lonesome fiddle, before vanishing into the void. But as the heroine finds her hidden powers, the title track closes with the full five-piece stampeding toward the next frontier. “I danced through age and fire,” sings Zeb Wright, backed by everything Bask embodies: mountainous bass, tumbling drums, blazing leads, and sunbursts of pedal steel. With The Turning, Bask weather the storm and look skyward.