Music Review: MoeDeLL
‘Ain’t That Something’
On this Americana rocker’s new album, the problems of quarantine life never sounded so fun.
MoeDeLL, 2021.
MoeDeLL is a Virginia boy who somehow made it out to Minnesota a few years back—the same trajectory I followed many years ago—but his down-home sound still hearkens back to the hills and hollers of the south. His warm, husky voice somehow sounds familiar even though Ain’t That Something is the first record of his that I’ve heard. The first song brings in sounds of crickets and frogs at one point, and the last song ends with the keening of cicadas—all sounds that take me back to the humid Virginia countryside.
Energized rhythm guitar and chugging outlaw-country drums keep the record moving with a forward momentum you can almost feel physically. An inveterate traveler who normally plays hundreds of shows a year, MoeDeLL apparently poured all his pent-up restlessness into this record. Every song is filled with propulsive energy, even the slightly slower ones or the ones driven mainly by acoustic guitar. Although it was written and recorded in lockdown, it would be a great soundtrack for a road trip.
MoeDeLL, 2021.
Knowing Ain’t That Something is a quarantine-born album, it’s easy to extrapolate COVID-era woes from the lyrics, which circle around four main themes: relationship passion and angst, frustrations with other people (possibly born of having limited contact with the outside world), overthinking, and longing for the open road. But these topics are all timeless, so they’ll endure long after the worst of the pandemic is in our rearview mirror. The first song, “B.O.P.,” encapsulates all four—it’s a breakup song that uses an extended metaphor comparing the relationship to a car that turns out to be a lemon: “I can’t live with this busted old promise that you gave to me.”
That feeling of defeated weariness at the end of a relationship contrasts sharply with the lyrics of “Fire” a few songs later. Intense and atmospheric, it conveys the exhilaration of new relationship energy in a way that reminded me of the Johnny Cash classic “Ring of Fire,” right down to the lyrics: “I go crazy for you, jumped into the fire / Ain’t no saving me now, got lost in the flames / Come hell or high water, ain’t no stopping now / Torch my soul, turn me upside down.”
MoeDeLL, 2021.
Alternately brimming with frenetic thoughts and attempts to block them out, all the songs on the album are full of nervous energy: “Thoughts spinning around my head, I gotta cut the grass and the doctor bills / looks like rain and I can’t pay a thing,” the insomniac narrator frets in “Cold Side of the Pillow.” “Hummin’ Along” perfectly expresses the disbelief and occasional numbness of being in pandemic lockdown: “Wanna hop a train out of town, ain’t nowhere to go / Whole world’s closing down, I guess I’m staying home … Think I’ll just shut it all off, forget about it / Everything'll be alright, I’ll just wait til then.”
Incorrigible relatives and problematic friends abound in the songs, too. In “Sunday Dinner,” the narrator gets an unwelcome visit from a “motor mouth” who “took a wrong turn right up to my house,” with predictably bad results: “Better stay clear of a head-on collision / That ain’t working see they got me in a corner / Spitting hellfire all about their life of problems.” The final song on the album, “All Hell’s Broke Loose Again,” is a humorous (and relatable) portrait of various colorful family members. Each description is summed up in the simple chorus: “Lord knows there's one in every family / There just ain’t a need to explain cause I think you know what I mean.”
MoeDeLL, 2021.
Through all of the frustration in the songs, MoeDeLL’s easygoing delivery keeps the listener connected, sympathetic and even somewhat optimistic that the world—and our lives—will get moving again. Green shoots of resilience and hope do appear in the lyrics themselves: “I got stories I can write so I can tell ’em all to you / I got one life to live so I’ll keep on hummin’ along,” he sings at one point.
Looking at his website, it appears MoeDeLL’s tour schedule is picking back up to a pace that clearly suits his energy levels, and I’m excited to catch one of his shows soon—I can tell from this album he’s going to be a lot of fun to see live.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
