🎧 Bask – “The Turning” Album Review (Season of Mist, Aug 22, 2025)
Words By Caine Blackthorn
In The Turning, Bask spin a cosmic Appalachian tale. Eight tracks that feel like riding through celestial wilds with banjo and black hole riffs echoing off canyon walls. Firmly rooted in their heavy Americana identity, they’ve flung open the barn doors, letting pedal steel, sludge, and spacetime swirl together in an intoxicating nebula of sound.
1. Chasm (1:30)
A cavernous whisper that opens the gateway as an echoing cello pulses and low frequency rumble seduce you into a liminal space. It’s a creaking door into another dimension soft enough to cradle, ominous enough to disrupt.
2. In the Heat of the Dying Sun (4:57)
Tracks like this burn slow. A gritty desert sunrise drips across cosmic vibration, dour cleans, smoky trumpet, and guitars that shimmer like heat on blacktop. You can almost taste the dust and feel the sun bending the horizon.
3. The Traveler (4:06)
Here, narrative vibes surge. A lone gunslinger astride a fractal steed, cloaked in a tapestry of bass and galloping drums. The melodies are cinematic. Part spaghetti-western lament, part astral projection. The Traveler coasts through timeless terrain, a sonic mirage you ride for the full four minutes.
4. The Cloth (4:12)
This one slinks upstream with Appalachian grit, banjo plunks and muddy chords, as if a black bear fights its way through a proggy sludge. It’s a rough and tumble folk-metal hybrid, unhinged yet homey, primitive yet forward-piped.
5. Dig My Heels (5:33)
The album’s propulsive centerpiece. Death metal boots meet pedal steel stardust. Beginning in Tampa Bay grind, it pivots on a dime. Drums lead on a sideways gallop, layers of shimmering steel explode like distant galaxies. As wild as any single could be, it’s Bask in full bloom.
6. Unwound (7:02)
Here the album exhales into seven minutes of slow burning catharsis. A labyrinthine sorrow emerges as chords twist, pedal steel burns like fading embers, and each note pulls your heart deeper into a gravitational field of emotion.
7. Long Lost Light (6:52)
A ghost hall porch song in spectral major. Piano twinkles like moonlight over empty streets. Fiddle and cello swirl in pure reverie. It’s haunted yet tender. A lament half remembered, half chanted into the void after Hurricane Helene’s tears seeped into their studio sessions.
8. The Turning (6:33)
The finale is a tenement of hope and dust. Pedal steel and bass stampede across the Milky Way. Drums churn like storms on alien plains. Vocal lines wade through fire and age. “I danced through age and fire” before it collapses in a cosmic exhale. It’s both punctuation and bridge. The saga closes yet opens infinitely.
Overall – Dreamscape Verdict
The Turning is a stained-glass kaleidoscope of Appalachian grit colliding with cosmic psychedelia. A heavy Americana concept album that refuses boxes. The band stares down calamity (pandemic, flood, van-breaking storms) and distills it into deep sonic gold. It’s immersive, transportive, unnerving and achingly beautiful. The narrative arc is cinematic, the performances heartfelt. Bask deliver their most magical, hallucinatory work yet.
Rating: 4 ½ metal horns
A haunting, dimensional ride through dust, dreams, and the dark side of the sun.
Recommended For:
Fans of psych rock, cosmic Americana, sludge leaning folk, or anyone who digs narrative journeys that feel like falling through black holes in cowboy boots.
Pre-order & Pre-save
https://orcd.co/basktheturning
Tracklist:
1. Chasm (1:30)
2. In the Heat of the Dying Sun (4:57)
3. The Traveler (4:06)
4. The Cloth (4:12)
5. Dig My Heels (5:33)
6. Unwound (7:02)
7. Long Lost Light (6:52)
8. The Turning (6:33)
Follow Bask:
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/bask/209266263
Bandcamp: https://basknc.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/basknc
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/baskband/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebandbask
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/44JvnzLiXzAtiMSDJTnFC7
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6xpcHS12Po7t2n8mzkVltw
