Bask played O’Brien’s – 12/13

North Carolina quartet Bask brought their 10-year anniversary tour to Allston with support from NYC’s Guhts and locals Rougarou. 

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No music fan is a stranger to the anniversary tour these days. One of the year’s highest-profile treks (in the indie sphere, anyway) saw Ben Gibbard taking Death Cab for Cutie’s magnum opus Transatlanticism and the beloved Postal Service’s lone LP on the road for their respective 20th birthdays, and just a couple weeks back Deafheaven delivered one of my favorite gigs of the season with a 10-year Sunbather celebration. Heavy stoner-psych crew Bask didn’t have an album milestone to celebrate this year (their debut American Hollow was a July 2014 release), but took the liberty of launching an anniversary tour anyhow to mark a decade of the band itself. A minor but novel twist!

As one might predict, last Wednesday’s set took a career-spanning approach, covering each of the band’s three full-lengths and teasing a forthcoming project with a new song. Bask’s distinctive sound – left-of-the-dial of your average stoner metal, with a heady, mountainous Americana flair – really resonates in a small room at a skull-rattling volume, so O’Brien’s was naturally a great fit for them. I’d only caught the band once prior, opening for Pallbearer way back in 2017, and was very glad to make a second acquaintance.

The sludgy post-metal of Brooklyn’s Guhts gamely occupied the direct support slot, and the bill was rounded out nicely with the heavy twang of Boston’s Rougarou. Scroll below for a gallery of the whole evening.