Never short on rearview adherents, American Rock ‘N’ Roll has a relentless new standard bearer. Kyle Craft’s second album, Full Circle Nightmare, carves his debut’s demonic bayou glamour into a joyful, if repetitive, blend of the 20th Century’s best derivations of the country-fried blues.
Craft’s ecstatic music is easily placed yet difficult to delineate. At different points, he jams with jaunty Elton John extravagance, moonlights as a bombastic Eric D. Johnson and channels Meatloaf going through a Steve Miller phase. There’s a familiar palette: guitar, drums, bass, twinkling piano and the odd organ slide, but Craft’s singular, theatrical focus keeps the mechanism urgent and inventive. That is, the musical references sit comfortably in the 1970s and the ethos is a purified mix of 2010’s manic apathy, apologetic self-inspection and suspect yet indefatigable charisma.
Beyond Johnson, Craft lacks easy contemporary comparisons, but Jack White’s controlled nostalgia is one obvious touchstone. The connecting tissue between the two is perhaps no better illustrated than on Full Circle Nightmare’s stomping mid-point, “Belmont (One Trick Pony).” From the opening scream to the torrential guitars and artillery drums, this wouldn’t feel out of place on anything from White’s post-‘Stripes oeuvre. While Craft has a denser, looser style that doesn’t smack of the crossover success White has enjoyed, Craft’s got him beat on pure lyricism by a good margin, and isn’t far off instrumentally.
Dynamic moment-to-moment, Craft’s narratives have a tendency to wander into a peripatetic sea of heartbreak and to sketch women with a heavy hand. Though this tick is present album-wide, “Fake Magic Angel,” “Full Circle Nightmare” and “Fever Dream Girl” in particular feature female characters whose beings peak as damaged, unknowable tropes — speculative fodder for his forsaken narrators. “Fever Dream Girl” and “Full Circle Nightmare” don’t lack for descriptive, inventive litanies, but stay fixed in plaintive machismo and reductionist metaphor — the result is more anthropologic than empathetic, catchy-as-hell though the results may be. That “Full Circle…” picks up literally where “Fever…” leaves off lyrically makes a cleverly intentional transition, but illuminates this distracting tendency to the “She’s [blank],” “She means [blank]” early on.
“Heartbreak Junky” and, later, “The Rager,” break this pattern, if subtly. While the narrators remain plaintive and forsaken, their objects of desire are given enough life to transcend that description. Though “The Rager” still features in a drop-dead, perpetual partier and “Heartbreak Junky” still leaves its equivalent purposefully unknowable, both songs at least strive for more humanizing portraits. The telltale cracks in the former’s nightly escapades show Craft’s ability to excel outside the metaphoric realm, and, for once “she” gets a few words in edgewise. “Heartbreak Junky” imbues the classic ‘why’d it all go wrong’ paean with charming self-awareness, and charmingly undercuts its rejectee’s what-ifs with a settled picture of his old flame’s more fulfilling current situation.
Full Circle Nightmare gets its kicks constantly. It has more heft than, both narratively and sonically, Craft’s debut, Dolls of Highland. And, thoroughly steeped in a recognizable tradition of backcountry rollick as he is, Craft delivers a decidedly modern approach to a sound first popularized decades ago.