by Emma Ingrisani
As the guitarist of Philadelphia trio Long Hots, Rosali Middleman has animated playful basement-punk ragers with the raw power of her playing; as a mononymic solo artist, she sings bruised folk-rock confessionals that can set vocals and instrumentation at high emotional contrast. On "Pour Over Ice" from her great 2021 album No Medium, her calm, sweet voice matter-of-factly declaims faults and losses—and lets her guitar's feral howls belie all that blunted equanimity.
With a new Rosali album on the horizon for 2024, last year found her mostly immersed in pure instrumentation: solo guitar study Variable Happiness, recorded under the name Edsel Axel, and Leave to Cool from Monocot, a collaboration with drummer Jayson Gerycz (also of Cloud Nothings). But while Variable Happiness dwells in fairly controlled tunefulness, Leave to Cool is the murkiest of psychedelic hazes. Ranging freely between the ambient and the melodic, Middleman and Gerycz conjure a kind of groovy primordial soup, from which sounds coalesce and surge forward.
Although its different phases or installments are too loose to seem entirely plotted out, Leave to Cool has a hypnotic quality that goes beyond the feel of a jam session. A couple of tracks ("Creamsicle," "Aunt Marsh") linger in a twinkling, dreamy register, but more characteristic are progressions which gradually accelerate and turn combustive. "Crumpled Green" and "Cold Mass" start out quietly and deliberately, but then gain traction to furious intensity—Gerycz's drums tumbling alongside Middleman's frenetic shredding, then lifting off into clouds of feedback and tape hiss.
In its intentional messiness and volatility, Leave to Cool is a pleasantly vexing listen. Patterns seem to partially form and then disintegrate; bent notes gradually accrue in fuzzy layers, challenging the listener to take in all their textures. The dynamic between the two musicians shows a similar tension: the warmth of Middleman's guitar continually intensifies and expands, while Gerycz's metallic rattles, taps, and thuds unexpectedly puncture or redirect the flow.
Yet Leave To Cool's most riveting track is also its most structurally coherent and propulsive. Not coincidentally, "The Voice Came" is also an epic unfurling of Middleman's guitar chops, sounding like an interlude from some lost, witchy rock opus. Over seven minutes and change, she elegantly shapes and builds on a heavy, undulating riff; Gerycz's drumbeats underscore and double the guitar's steady stomp. It's a thrilling glimpse of Middleman at her headiest heights: graceful, focused, and brimming with swagger.