Rosali Middleman, the singer-songwriter known as Rosali, first crossed paths with Nebraska rock guitarist David Nance out on tour. In his group’s full-bodied classic rock sound, she heard a kindred spirit—and a new possibility for what became her third album, 2021’s No Medium. After the reverb-heavy acoustic fare of her 2016 debut Out of Love and the steely edged folk rock of Trouble Anyway two years later, Nance and his band Mowed Sound helped to refract the flickering lamplight of her voice like a gold-veined vintage mirror. Together, they fashioned her Americana instincts—soft traces of pedal steel, banjo, and harp—into the warm, plush sound of 1960s rock’n’roll.
Teaming once again with Nance and members of Mowed Sound on Bite Down, her new album and first release with Merge, Rosali commits definitively to rock’n’roll’s most well-worn textures. It’s clothing she wears well, sounding at times like Stevie Nicks’ drowsy-voiced niece in the way she assesses life’s lingering bruises with cool disregard. “Said it was nothing/Well, what was it then?” she sings with a hint of side-eye on “Is It Too Late.” The track moves along at an easy drift, reflecting Rosali’s outward indifference, until the band accelerates to a frenzy on the last chorus, and reveals the deeper ache provoking her retorts.
Rosali perfumed No Medium with romance, but on Bite Down, those flowers have withered. New possibilities present themselves with no clear way forward. “I am here but I too may go/My body cares for nothing anymore,” she sings on the scuttling “Hopeless,” electric guitar fuzzy and dense behind her as she watches the last embers of love die out. Rosali has stumbled up against these questions before, but the hard-won confidence she displays across Bite Down is more willing to relinquish the need for an answer. “There is no way/No one way/Be there, OK/Be awake,” she sings on “Change Is in the Form.” James Schroeder’s glinting autoharp breaks up the album’s predilection for guitar jams, spiking the chorus with psychedelic sun glare.
Rosali finds the headiest chemistry with the Mowed Sound on mid-tempo grooves like “Hopeless” or slow burns like “Hills on Fire,” which builds a kind of atmospheric heat lightning. You can hear their chummy interplay on the skittering rhythm of “On Tonight,” a warm-hearted confab that sets delicate traces of acoustic and electric guitar against JJ Idt’s thick, rolling bassline. But when they crank songs up, like the jump-start of the Crazy Horse-nodding “My Kind,” Rosali’s voice gets lost, her attitude of nonchalance running against the grain. “My Kind” waits for her to impart a larger emotional flourish, as when her voice rises in confession on “Hopeless,” but instead she holds back.
At times Rosali can linger too long in a song. “My Kind” begins to feel like an extended chorus because she repeats the title phrase so frequently, the music ruminating alongside her rather than evolving to punctuate the churning repetition. Even the charming “On Tonight” burrows down into the chorus, spending the song’s final minute repeating some variation of the phrase, “You’re on tonight.” Bite Down is at its best when Rosali complicates an idea rather than simply circling it. In a rare flash of earnestness, she sings on “Rewind”: “I’m a gold light made of rhythm and space/She’s a soft wind, you’ll meet her someday.” What a tender surprise.
