Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0008

 A Moment for the Mowed Middle

One of my favorite records of this year is Rosali’s fourth album Bite Down. This is by design; Rosali Middleman has four solo albums under her belt and each one gets closer to a reality I wish more singer-songwriters could understand. Listening to her previous records gives you a sense of the scope and potential at each stage in this career, but Bite Down (following No Medium, her first outing with a core backing band of Omaha heavies Jim Schroeder on guitar, David Nance on bass, and Kevin Donahue on drums) shows not only a deep command of her range as a songwriter, but the kind of innate, unspoken understanding with her crew, which only comes with time, trust and bond that makes the landing all that much sweeter. The breadth of this music is explored in depth on the earlier ones, but this is where it becomes their language, where the possibility of this tension and the inevitable release becomes whole. On the skin we get a Buckingham Nicks level ache, twinned with the lonesome hope of Linda Ronstadt, but at the core there is a pull towards the listener to come closer to the songs, and get their brows blown back when Jim rocks an impeccably crooked solo, and a relatable stillness through Rosali’s words and tone, both of which show every bit they can tell. If this kind of rock isn’t for you, I can’t help any more than they do, but even the most put-upon purist has to recognize the extremely high and personal levels at which Bite Down delivers, its determined ascent and lilting fall to close.

Looking through my holdings physical and digital, I’m sitting on about 25 releases by David Nance. Nearly half of these are end-to-end covers of specific albums, from Doug Sahm and Band to The Cure’s Disintegration. A bunch more are live recordings (where fools have perennially slept), and the rest are studio recordings, from home/bedroom stuff to full-fledged facilities.

Each and every one of these records takes a specific, homespun direction, led by Nance’s curiosity and the abilities of his various bandmembers. Here is a guy who basically started with reverence to New Zealand’s elite eight (shifting gears on his debut LP Actor’s Diary between Plagal Grind/Clean worship on “Glittering Lies” to the bottom of Alastair Galbraithian despair on “Carpet” right after) and just kept going, a Nebraskan polyglot in proximity to elders like Simon Joyner who were there for the ride the first time around.

Nance’s reach touches psych, punk/noise, uncle hand-me-down records, Southern rock, R&B and folk traditions, DIY tin tones, and Link Wray’s three-track shack. His all-in, big tent approach has yet to produce a bum result, and unlike almost every other unit in the two-dozen-or-more releases, he’s been bulletproof in quantity to quality, able to push very deliberate, personal spins into so many different kinds of music (like transforming Devo’s “Pink Pussycat” into Chicago jump blues or Melanie’s “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” into ebullient raga rock), effortlessly inventive and able to make it his own. His collab with Joyner on the nearly-sued-out-of-existence Bedspring Symphony was my path into Goat’s Head Soup, which never stuck until I heard what they did with it (essentially turning “Dancin’ with Mr. D” into The Fall, more or less). There’s not much of a suggestion of a starting point; it's 100%.

Nance has also played a part in building an informal network connecting bands all through the country through works with Philadelphia’s Richard Charles (Petty Bunco and Richie/Testostertunes labels, their collab in Astute Palate with Emily Robb and Writhing Squares’ Daniel Provenzano), which begat a tour with the Long Hots, a connection with Rosali, and ultimately Rosali’s collab with Jim Schroeder.

At some point I am going to cover the Richie web – deserving of a Pete Frame-esque family tree of musical relations from Kurt Vile, Mary Lattimore and Meg Baird to Home Blitz, Violent Students and Mordecai, but I want to spend a little time discussing Schroeder’s solo album Mesa Buoy, an absolute high water mark out of this community, recorded in 2018 and dropped in the pandemic haze of Q3 2020.

With a large group of alternate collaborators alongside Kevin Donahue and Nance on a few tracks, this record is unlike much else out there. Pedal steel and cello augment a traditional electric folk/country outfit given to the pinewood reveries of drone Americana groups like Old Saw and Flanger Magazine, though entirely in its own traditions. Unpredictably cinematic, the record is interspersed with parts of a longer composition which reaches out to Can style levels of Germanic improvisation, full Coryell-esque meltdowns, and a restlessness that feels more at home in a concert hall, smashing eggheads, than anything else from this crew. Digital downloads with the vinyl album contain the uncut 55-minute sprawl of this piece for the next time you wanna get found. This is sitting at the Dave/Rosali merch table; not giving it attention would be a fuckup of the highest order. 

Could expound about this crew for hours but I’m actually headed down to see Rosali at Pitchfork, cold comfort for having to miss a Nance/Mowed Sound set at the Bottle last night where Rosali joined them for a cover of INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart.” There’s always a next time, I tell myself, and with these folks I am given to believe it – one of the truest and always-on organizations in American music today.

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Doug Mosurock