There’s a Tim Key-like quality to James Milne’s eviscerating lyricism: “Cursing the time when you were a tart / You really were an arsehole that day”, he sings on Sweet Dissatisfaction, a song that reflects on his youth and recklessness – a prevailing theme of the Kiwi songwriter’s fourth album. The mellow, slightly unimaginative follow-up to 2012’s forlorn The Sparrow comes after the birth of his first child, but rather than panic in midlife mania, he is instead wracked with shame, resenting his “young and arrogant,” “bold and bullish, kind of toolish” former self. Still, there are phrases that suggest his pre-fatherhood freedom was well used: “I used to be commitment free,” he laments on What Became of the Angry Young Man. As if writing the score to his own mumblecore biopic, Milne combines dusky romance, chintzy 60s pop and the skewered songwriting of Jim Noir and Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci with comically brutal putdowns. It’s an album engulfed by bittersweet nostalgia.
