The Traveler

They’ve always sounded of their own time and place, but on their long-awaited fourth album, BASK take Heavy Americana to a whole new dimension.

BASK remain grounded in the natural-born sounds of Appalachia, which pokes its prickly head through their sludgier tracks, but ‘The Turning’ truly straddles the fence between cosmic and country. Though already in the band’s orbit, this is their first album to welcome Jed Willis as an official member. Lead single “Dig My Heels” starts with its boots firmly planted in rugged pastures before bounding for the great beyond, where Willis’ pedal steel swirls like all the colors of the Milky Way.

‘The Turning’ doesn’t just span genres. It stretches across generations in man’s never-ending quest for immortality. The album's spurred heroine, known simply as The Rider, has her extraterrestrial world turned upside down by "The Traveller", a mysteriously ageless gunslinger, who arrives armed with a double-barreled riff atop galloping drums. Maze-like twists are revealed at every self-referential turn as the star-crossed outlaws try and outrun the changing of the seasons. But while out of this world, the dwellings on family, aging, death and rebirth hit close to home.

The band finished recording ‘The Turning’ just a few weeks before Hurricane Helene reached their hometown of Asheville, NC. With a wearisome gait, "Long Lost Light" drifts through a ghost town haunted by salooning piano and high, lonesome fiddle, until it's swept like sawdust into the void. But just as the album’s heroine discovers her hidden powers, the title track ends with the newly mounted five-piece stampeding toward the next frontier. "I danced through age and fire", vocalist and guitarist Zeb Wright belts, backed by everything BASK stand for: mountainous bass, tumbling drums, blazing leads and sunbursts of pedal steel.

On ‘The Turning’, BASK weather the storm with a heavy ode to their mountain home in the sky.