True to its penchant for lipstick and lingerie, glam rock has proven to be the most promiscuous of musical genres. Its sneering, transgressive attitude and electric-warmongering paved the way for punk, but its theatrical flair also connects it to the caped crusaders of prog. And since its early ’70s heyday, glam rock’s aesthetics have been revamped by everyone from synth-pop androgynes to hair-metal shriekers to 21st-century boys and toys alike. But this looseness has its limits—Elton John’s Honky Château residency notwithstanding, the world is still waiting for its first true glitter-speckled, roots-rock renegade. And though Portland (via Shreveport, Louisiana) maverick Kyle Craft doesn’t really tart himself up beyond the occasional silver-hair dye job, his frisky, fantastical debut album, Dolls of Highland, proves the gig is his for the taking.
Dolls of Highland is reportedly a break-up album, cobbled from the ashes of a flamed-out eight-year relationship and recorded in a makeshift home studio set up in a friend’s laundry room. But you’d never know about that heart-rending inspiration from the stage-crashing gusto on display here. If Dolls of Highland has a basis in autobiography—the title references the Shreveport neighborhood where it was made—Craft spends the album imagining himself as Ziggy Sawdust, a flamboyant fop working the barrelhouse piano in the front room of the seediest bayou bordello. His songs illustrate how the intense religiosity and voodoo-infused mythology of the South make it fertile turf for the sort of colorful characterization and freak-scenery on which glam rock was founded. This is an album populated by burlesque dancers, bloodsuckers, lonely nightclub singers, goth girls, one-night stands, suicide victims, and otherwise innocent folk going crazy from the heat. Craft summons you into their world like a carnival barker wooing unsuspecting customers into a funhouse attraction.
Like all good Southern boys, Craft grew up in the church before discovering the devil’s music, and he’s prone to casting his songs’ female protagonists as temptresses who can corrupt the most pious of choir boys. There’s the undead damsel of “Eye of a Hurricane” who lures oblivious paramours to their demise with a “kiss down in the catacombs,” and the pole-dancing star of “Berlin” (the stripper’s stage name, not the German city) who renders her most loyal customer a blubbering, blue-balled mess hiding in a rear corner booth. But Craft transcends witchy-woman cliches through both self-deprecating humor and surprisingly sympathetic portrayals—like the vampiric hero of “Jane Beat the Reaper” who wears “medallions on a string, she said they warded off the boredom/ Of life alone and the constant sting of what she was before them.” The further you venture into Dolls of Highland, the more its laundry-room recording locale makes sense: This is an album where dirty souls can go to be cleansed.
Craft is one of those singers who is always on, with a moonstruck howl of a voice that seizes you by the lapels. Its audacity is only amplified by the relatively rustic environs: the beautiful barstool serenade “Balmorhea” could pass for a Bat Out of Hell ballad if Meat Loaf was backed by The Band, while the vivacious countrified romp “Future Midcity Massacre” sounds like a Styx from the sticks. His performances are extravagant, but never excessive, using a folk singer’s sepia-toned palette—acoustic guitars, piano, harmonica—to make radiant, rambunctious rock ‘n’ roll, while subtly bending time and space with electrified guitar slides that hearken back to the heartland psychedelia of early-'90s Flaming Lips.
But Craft’s outsized personality is matched by less flashy, more fundamental skills: vivid, immersive storytelling and sharply focused, fat-free songs that have the lived-in feel of 40-year-old FM-radio favorites. And he can dial down the irreverence and deliver the drama on more sobering turns like “Trinidad Beach (Before I Ride)” (where Craft forges a spiritual kinship with another southern Anglophilic misfit, the late Chris Bell of Big Star), and the astounding “Lady of the Ark,” a strummed-out song for a silenced siren that’s launched heavenward atop Spectorized drum crashes and sleigh-bell rattles. “Swing low, sweet heathen/ Swing for the wretch and the rock ‘n’ roll kid,” Craft belts out in the song’s dying moments. “Roam this earth, repeat it/ All this sin until this wicked world makes sense.” Kyle Craft may no longer go to church, but he nonetheless commands a congregation, united in ostracization and a fundamental belief in blasphemy.
