No Medium Tracklist:

Side A 

1. Mouth (3:48)

2. Bones (4:46)

3. Pour Over Ice (3:10)

4. Waited All Day (3:34)

5. All This Lightning (3:09)

Side B 

6. Whisper (3:19)

7. If Not For Now (4:32)

8. Whatever Love (4:37)

9. Your Shadow (3:30)

10. Tender Heart (5:51)

“Here is a mouth, saying your name” runs the opening line, simply stated yet sparking a universe of questions. It’s a looking glass of a statement that encapsulates the shimmering terrain mapped by Rosali’s third full-length record, No Medium. The songs arrive with the comfort of a visit with an old friend and the wide-eyed expanse of the open road. Backed by the David Nance Group, Rosali has fashioned an unhurried, vulnerable song cycle that chugs with poised, poetic twang. Plus, her singing is fucking delicious.

In these bursts of internal drama, the everyday is revealed as a stage for conflict, curiosity, and transcendence. Rosali’s world prizes ethereality above precision. ‘Doesn’t it feel like love?’ she asks. ‘Doesn’t it remind you of that?’ Even frustration manifests as an opportunity to expand the singer’s probing. ‘All I have is your silence/Fuck off with your fear/Say whatever you will/Cuz I’m ready to hear.’ The ‘you’ addressed is often an abstraction, a figure that haunts the songs rather than directly occupying them. The most eternal themes require the most confidence and, inevitably, the most risk. Laying oneself bare isn’t easy. Laying oneself bare and making it infectious is even tougher. 

And you should know that ‘Whatever Love’ is the song you never knew you needed to hear until one night it comes blowing out of a jukebox in a joint you’ve found yourself in all out of time and out of mind and you start to sway and swoon and then you’re stunned by the things the song says and seduced by the way it feels and you wake up with the sweetest headache wondering what happened and how and when you might be able to get back there.

-Matt Krefting, Holyoke, MA
January 2021

While the collection of songs on Philadelphia/Michigan musician Rosali’s electrifying third LP, No Medium, explores the often dark territory of loss, death, sexuality, self-sabotage, and addiction, there is a surprising lightness to its sonic being. Backed by members of the David Nance Group, Rosali (Long Hots, Wandering Shade, Monocot) wades through the emotional mire with infectious, earworm melodies led by her luminous voice. With their rich, raw instrumentation, these rock ballads sound like the resilience discovered in facing one’s darkest moments, the assurance of the calm and clarity that comes after the storm. As she sings on the second track, “Bones,” “Through the darkness of the field / I walk through without yielding / To the rest of the feelings / I’m carrying.” With her confident song craft, Rosali illustrates the ability to push through, moving toward something greater without being destroyed by the weight of trauma. 

Rosali wrote the bulk of these songs in January of 2019 while on a self-imposed two-week residency in the hills of South Carolina. Alone in an old farmhouse, she experienced supernatural events and faced her own demons in the deepest darkness. Perhaps as a result, there is a boldness that permeates the album, a daring vulnerability in both the lyrical themes and their musical accompaniment. Rosali says, “I approach guitar playing the same intuitive way I sing, which is profoundly spiritual for me. Where words fail, the guitar becomes the conduit for raw feelings, providing a direct connection to them. I’m constantly working on being fearless in my work, which means showing the rough side, the mistakes along with the triumphs.” 

While writing No Medium, Rosali was inspired by harmonographs—swinging pendulums that create beautiful illustrations of the mathematics of music—considering how the mind, too, creates images through song.  She imagined herself as the swinging pendulum—“a body suspended from a fixed point” (Encyclopedia Britannica), governed by the forces surrounding her. She thought about the pendulum’s relationship to time, movement, and even its use in divination practices. The album’s title, lifted from Charlotte Brontë’s, Jane Eyre, resonated with this vision: “I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other.” With the multiple meanings of “medium”—as middle ground,  a term for psychics, and as the material of artistic expression—No Medium felt like the appropriate name, describing how the self is shaped by the patterns of life .  

The influences for the sound of No Medium reflect this pairing of assured vulnerability, in the stylistic coherence of Bob Dylan’s Desire, the tender delivery in Iain Matthews’ Journey From Gospel Oak, the strut and swagger of Bowie’s Hunky Dory, the ambition and beauty of Gene Clark’s No Other, and the playful catharsis of Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Schmilsson. The Richard and Linda Thompson-esque album opener “Mouth,” places Rosali within both a physical and emotional space. “East of the river I was travelling on / watch me lie, undone / rest me in a forest, overgrown / until I am free of all that I’ve known,” she sings. There is movement, both within a cityscape, and in her outlook on love. Speaking of her thought process when writing the song, she says,  “I imagine confidently walking away from the past, toward a new approach to love and intimacy to achieve a  closer relationship with myself.”  

In “Pour Over Ice,” Rosali explores her relationship with alcohol and her former reliance upon it as a social lubricant to quell her social anxiety, an energizer to keep moving, a means to cope and self-medicate, and most addictively, to lure out her wild side as a free flowing, good time girl. While drinking helped her through some shitty times, it eventually got the upper hand and became an insatiable hole within.  She says, “The ‘you’ in the song is really me, talking to that component of myself struggling with drinking and self-sabotage, caught up in the cycle, and all the bad choices I made.” She sings, “Maybe I didn’t care enough / or can’t remember / chasing small pleasures / making fire from embers.”  Rosali wanted her lead guitar on this track to simultaneously sound like a slow motion car crash propelling her through the day, and the sound of a gnawing hunger for something more.

Rosali’s alliance with the Omaha musicians that orbit David Nance Group (including Nance himself) came about while on a Long Hots / DNG tour in the summer of 2019. Great friendships formed and one night after playing in Detroit, Dave suggested they be her backing band. The pairing was effortless and natural, and in November of the same year, they were recording No Medium in a basement in Omaha. Engineered by James Schroeder and featuring Kevin Donahue (Simon Joyner), James Schroeder (Simon Joyner, DNG, Connor Oberst), David Nance, Noah Sterba, Colin Duckworth, and Daniel Knapp, the album was recorded in ten days and the raw immediacy of the music is palpable across these ten tracks. Added adornment was contributed by Philadelphia's Robbie Bennett (War on Drugs) on organ and keys, and Matt Barrick (The Walkmen, Jonathan Fire Eater, Muzz) makes a percussion cameo on “Whisper,”which was tracked at Philly’s Silent Partner Studio, where No Medium was mixed by Quentin Stoltzfus (Mazarin, Light Heat). The open creative collaboration elevated the songs, resulting in the exciting, vibrant sound of the album.

Selected Press for No Medium:

“With members of the David Nance Group soaring behind her, Rosali sheds many a demon on this new work. Her arc on the record is a steep one, confronting addiction, heartbreak, and loss with raw intensity. Across vast oceans of ragged and scorched guitar, country-rock jams and lilting piano ballads, she comes to terms with, and leaves behind past selves–being born anew amongst the embers and the grace of embracing reality on your own terms.” -Chad Depasquale, Aquarium Drunkard

"Few fuzz like Rosali. She drags fuzz through life’s bullshit and comes out roses…or at least writes songs that grapple with the ugly and the pretty on equal terms. Members of the David Nance Group back her up on this record, churning out Crazy Horse rockers, but also hang-dog Cat Power ballads." -Lars Gotrich, NPR Music & Viking's Choice

“It’s been a long time since anyone has reminded me this much of Neil Young, as much for the graceful, unfussed melodies as for the surge of guitar racket, and it’s her, not her backing band, that compels the comparison.” -Jennifer Kelly, Dusted

"Cascading into an unknown future, held on high by the sturdy roots of Rosali’s incredible songwriting and David Nance Group’s raw, organic sound, No Medium is a beautiful gift." -Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis