Rosali: Bite Down | Merge Records; March 22
Album covers don’t often merit discussion in music reviews, but Bite Down, the Merge Records debut from Rosali Middleman, who performs as Rosali, has a particularly strange one. It’s a color photograph, no text: Rosali stares with wild eyes and bared teeth through the branches of a curly willow, like some joyful predator preparing to leap from the foliage.
At first, the unsettling image seems incompatible with the music that follows, which is a pleasantly warm mix of rock subgenres—folk, psych, blues—guided by Rosali’s golden voice. But Bite Down quickly reveals deeper ambivalences and the album cover comes into clearer focus: “Yeah you freak me out / And that’s what I came for,” Rosali sings on the beautiful but slightly sinister opener, “On Tonight.”
In 2021, Rosali relocated from Philadelphia to the Durham area, transplanting from one fertile music scene to another. (The endearingly low-budget music video for “Rewind,” one of the singles on Bite Down, was filmed in Carrboro’s All Day Records.) It was in Philadelphia that Rosali first connected with Omaha rocker David Nance and his band Mowed Sound, which played on her 2021 release, No Medium, and which appears again on Bite Down.
It would be a disservice to call Mowed Sound a backing band: They are the Crazy Horse to Rosali’s Neil Young, and match the charisma of their leading vocalist with a convincing, occasionally unruly force.
Near the end of “Hopeless,” a plaintive but resolute track about a departed lover, the crunchy guitars come barreling out of nowhere like a bull from a rodeo chute. On “My Kind,” the members of Mowed Sound bang out a floor-shaking rhythm while Rosali growls, “How am I gonna live without you?”
Bite Down finds Middleman embodying that joyful predator from the album cover, trying to seize life in her jaws and give it a loving shake. “Help me darlin’,” she sings on the title track, “I can’t seem to / Bite down on it / I can’t seem to feel what’s real anymore.”
The warm, clean tone of the record belies its emotional murkiness. For all its radiance and emotional heft, Rosali’s voice does not divulge all its secrets. “Have you seen my grief?” she asks on the spiky “Slow Pain.” “Hold it so I don’t spill out / Keep quiet and wait it out.”
Bite Down closes with “May It Be on Offer,” a simmering prayer of a song whose plodding tambourine evokes The Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.” All the guitars go silent and Rosali’s unshowy lyrics manage to find some clarity in the noise. “And I’ll sit for hours,” she sings, “Gazing at the light / And there I do wonder / And waste my life.” She corrects herself: “No, I don’t wonder / If I waste my life.”
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