It will surprise exactly no one that one of the great musical wordsmiths of our times—Dan Bejar of Destroyer—so precisely and succinctly gets to the heart of Bite Down, the new album from North Carolina-based singer-songwriter Rosali. “It’s hard to talk about Rosali’s music. Songs that reach outward like this, but then constantly disarm with their intimacy,” Bejar writes about Rosali’s Merge Records debut. “What do you call such inner searching that is hellbent on rollicking?”
Here’s a hint: You’re not going to do much better than “inner searching that is hellbent on rollicking.” This is the magic of Rosali Middleman’s music, at least at this point in her career, which finds her pairing her enchanting folk-rock songs with the same band, Mowed Sound, that backed her on her excellent 2021 album No Medium. Mowed Sound is David Nance (bass/guitar), James Schroeder (guitar/synth) and Kevin Donahue (percussion); on Bite Down, they were joined in the studio by keyboardist Ted Bois. Together, these players work like a living backdrop, capable of shapeshifting between lean, pulsing grooves (“On Tonight”), easygoing jangle-twang (“Rewind”), psych-funk hybrids (“Bite Down”) and street-tough classic rock (“Hopeless”). Bejar nails it here, too: “It’s a strange, telepathic brew,” he says of Mowed Sound.
Of course, any band worth its weight benefits from songs with a strong gravitational pull, and Rosali dishes those out in heaping helpings. Like No Medium before it, Bite Down is packed wall to wall with tunes that are unsettled but unhurried, generous with melody, wandering but never lost, and reliably steady despite the never-ending twists and turns of an earthly existence. But above all, they are beautiful, broken and built around the kind of raw emotional uncertainty that will resonate with anyone who has ever lived, loved and/or lost. To wit, these two stanzas from “Slow Pain,” an unabashed rocker that ends with a 90-second guitar solo and simmers with familiar frustration: “Have you seen my grief? / Hold it so I don’t spill out / Keep quiet and wait it out / My ghosts won’t let me be / Making faces you can’t see /Better go before you’re on to me.”
Elsewhere, the album’s highlights include “My Kind,” a kinetic, country-blues stomper that serves as evidence that Rosali is perfectly capable of a Waxahatchee-style arc if she chooses to pursue it, and “Hills on Fire,” a triumph of room-sound atmospherics and squirrelly guitar-isms that feels like watching a lightning storm crawl across a vast flatland, or perhaps childhood trauma streaking through an adult body.
And while Bite Down has more approachable peaks, it ends with two tracks that echo both its stylistic range and its recurring themes of pain, self-reflection, healing and hope. First, “Change Is In The Form” builds a Crazy Horse-style crescendo around Rosali’s sing-song ruminations on the impermanence of life, which give way to “May It Be On Offer,” a quiet prayer for restoration and deliverance underpinned by long, droning tones. “There is hope upon me,” Rosali sings, with what sounds like fresh recognition in her voice. “There is reason to try.” Amen, indeed. That hard-won epiphany is the destination and Bite Down is the sound of the journey. We are fortunate Rosali has brought us all along for the ride.
Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Follow him on your social media platform of choice at @bcsalmon.
