Kyle Craft’s album wasn’t one I quickly gravitated to, but after many mentions by folks who’s taste I appreciate, I dug in deep—thankfully. 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—Kyle 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.
In a Dylan-meets-glam-meets-enchanted-booze-fairy kinda way, this album grabs you and takes you along for a helluva ride. Buckle up, amigo.
