Apparently, to know Chris Mills is to have dated him, and suffered through the barbed-wire aftermath of a break-up. Last heard from on 1998’s Every Night Fight For Your Life, Mills was busy obfuscating his ambiguous tales of love with some of the most eclectic musical accompaniment he could unearth. Veering wildly between Spectoresque walls of sound and stick-figure acoustic drawings, it effectively established Mills as an heir to Elvis Costello’s conflicted romantic kingdom.
The bleakly titled Kiss It Goodbye serves up a cynical collection plate full of Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Songs for the emotionally impaired. The Chicagoan hauls in the expected scenester pals to help out, splitting production between Brian Deck (Red Red Meat) and Mekons/Waco Bros. majordomo Jon Langford, but somehow manages to create a song cycle that pays debt to both the tradition of George Jones and the raw edge of the Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli.
One might conclude Mills has become little more than a garden-variety misogynist if the record weren’t balanced with a torrent of self-lacerating doubt. The evidence is plain in the assorted fragments that indicate the state of his jaundiced heart: “All I could ever do was hit her” (“Napkin In A Wine Glass”), “That key you’ve got will only unlock a box of tears” (“Watch Chain”), “You’ve got stretch marks from reaching too far” (“Lips Are Like Poison”). Mills has no trust in the institution of love, fully expecting to get stepped on when the joy of discovery turns into the boredom of the known.
“You are the architect of your heart’s destruction”, Mills sings in “Fall”, lecturing himself in the process. If heartbreak is the equivalent of Armageddon, as Mills seems to suggest, it’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels like crap.