For No Medium, her third album, Rosali enlists David Nance and his band for a raucous, Crazy Horse-ish roar, recording mostly live in ten days with all stops pulled. And yet, though Nance and his crew add a definitely heat and flavor, the songwriter remains very much at the center. 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.

Rosali’s last album drew on a different, less rough-necked band but pulled a similar trick. When I reviewed Trouble Anyway in 2018 for Dusted, I wrote “What jumps out at you is how smoothly intricate the mix of sounds is, how beautifully the boom of bass notes pushes melody forward, how achingly the pedal steel underlines the melancholy, how easily Middleman’s voice flits and flutters and plummets bluesily into an enveloping mesh of sounds.” She is likewise in control here, gaining heft and volume from her band but never ceding authority.

Consider, “Bones,” for instance, a wild blare of blues rock, rough and distorted and slouchy, like an offcut from Let It Bleed, from whose turmoil Rosali emerges unscathed, her voice low and certain, fluted with the tiniest bit of vibrato, and warmly, confidently melodic. “So I gathered my bones, to go back home, to be alone,” she asserts in the chorus, gathering strength as the line progresses. The guitar solo, when it erupts, seems to carry and express that strength, not obliterate it.  

Elsewhere, things get pared back, as for instance, on the piano ballad “Waited All Day,” where only a few chords, a soft swell of choral music, fill out the contours of Rosali’s voice and the song. But what a song it is, fluttering and fluting and refracting the title phrase into a few dozen syllables. “All This Lightning,” which follows, may be the best of the slow songs, framed in acoustic guitar with a little electric blues catching fire in the periphery. “All this lightning…ain’t frightening to me,” Rosali croons softly, with the calm that comes from getting through life, seeing a lot and knowing that most of it can’t hurt you.

This is just Rosali’s third album, but there’s a lovely maturity to it. She came to singing late; she’s not one of those artists that you can watch growing up record to record. But she is getting better, all the time and at a rapid pace. No Medium is her best yet.