Kyle Craft, it would seem, is someone to whom lyrics matter a great deal. “I hate the idea of conforming to shitty lyricism that happens nowadays,” the 29-year-old, Portland-based songwriter said in a recent interview. “It’s not everyone, but there is definitely a lower bar for what is considered good lyricism now.” Citing Bob Dylan as an influence, he also noted that his second studio LP, Full Circle Nightmare, is “a little less scatterbrained” than his 2016 debut, Dolls of Highland. “I think there’s a focal point to the lyricism,” he said, and about that, he’s right. Full Circle Nightmare fixates more or less entirely on one topic: women and their ability to ruin a man through their powers of seduction.
Femme fatales stalk every nook and cranny of this album, which takes the honky-tonk, classic rock sound of Craft’s previous LP and, with the help of the Decemberists’ Chris Funk on production, pushes it to a gleaming, saturated extreme. Pianos, drums and guitars all come crashing into the album like outlaws thrown through plate glass windows in an Old West town. At the center of the mayhem is Craft’s bugle-like voice, steering confidently around tricky melodic turns and full-lunged choruses. If he stuck to the shadows at points during Dolls of Highland, letting the listener catch their breath between bursts of fanfare, he clings to the spotlight here. Even the songs that start quietly, like the tortured love ballad “Bridge City Rose,” inevitably erupt into full-blown climaxes with confetti falling from the rafters.
Fair enough: If you’re going to cosplay the Rolling Stones as 19th-century saloon flies, you might as well commit to the bit. But where the Stones dragged humor and pathos into even their most inane ditties, Craft seems to stall out at reciting various colorful metaphors. The album’s opening track, “Fever Dream Girl,” plugs far-flung analogies into the same sentence construction over and over again. “Was she the train wreck?/Was she your last drag?/Was she the little piece of mind you thought you once had?” he asks in the song’s opening stanza. “Was she the cure-all/Or just the disease?/Was she the ransack gutter kid denim jeans?” Craft goes on, naming different opposing possibilities for what this woman may or may not be. Even if he hadn’t cribbed a binary from a 2002 Coldplay hit, the repetition would be exhausting. When the next song begins with an almost identical construction (“She was a ricochet/Headin’ back at me/She was the full circle nightmare/Weaved into the thick of my dreams”), it’s enough to make you check the tracklist to see if you’re hearing a coda to that last song or if he’s really firing the whole thing up a second time.
“Shes” and “to be” verbs swarm Full Circle Nightmare, which every so often sees Craft finding solace in the company of women, but more frequently shows him sneering at them. On “Belmont (One Trick Pony),” he breaks out a solid Jack White impression to make fun of a woman for living in the suburbs while he frolics in the city. On “Heartbreak Junky,” he seethes at a woman who had the audacity to fall in love with someone other than him. On “Fake Magic Angel,” he rips into a woman for wearing certain clothes and reading, I don’t know, Cosmo? “You flaunt yourself in that same dress/And talk how your magazines taught you,” he sings by way of an insult to her authenticity. To his credit, the same song boasts a self-own for the ages: “You suck life out of what’s around you/But you won’t be sucking nothing out of me.”
Occasionally, women appear on Full Circle Nightmare as characters, not merely temptresses to be derided for daring to be attractive. The comparatively gentle “Slick & Delta Queen” has Craft shacking up with an on-again, off-again girlfriend who’s as sick of it all as he is, though he still spends most of the song mourning her absence when she leaves him for someone else. The fur-clad seductress on “The Rager” seems to be nursing some heartbreak of her own, even if Craft does end up labeling her a “walking apocalypse.” On the whole, though, the women Craft expends so much breath obsessing over drift in and out of his songs like cardboard cutouts from a bygone era, there to be lusted after and then blamed when they don’t fit into his fantasy.
