Tim Fite

Gone Ain't Gone

(Anti-)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

In a world with increasingly shorter attention spans, Tim Fite is both a dream and a nightmare.  He is a recycler of sorts, taking snippets from used CD bins and throwing them together, like a hunter who makes stew from things no one would normally consider edible.  He is himself, then, something like the kid surfing through 30-second clips on iTunes, trying to find something immediate.  But trying to gauge the whole of Fite’s end result by a quick 30 seconds here and there is, of course, an extremely inexact science.

The result, Gone Ain’t Gone, is certainly, at times, more “interesting” than “enjoyable.”  But it’s an album that finds success by falling on its face, and everyone who has wasted afternoons flipping through discard bins will at least appreciate Fite’s effort to seek out the otherwise forgotten and unloved.  There’s twang-rock, then, that relies on sampling (as the whole album does).  There is G. Love-ish ramshackle rap.  If he had to settle down into one genre and be a "proper" singer/songwriter, Fite would certainly be best served by the alt-country route, although the hip-hop adventures aren’t as disastrous as they surely could have been.  “Forty-Five Remedies” combines a little of everything, starting bluesy, showing some electro-blips in the background, breaking into profanity-laden hip-hop flow for the verses, and then settling into a lazy, countrified chorus.  Other songs have a somewhat more single-minded or traditional focus, and it would perhaps be a condemnation of the concept if one of those songs had been the highlight.  Instead, though, it’s “No Good Here,” an upbeat rock track that marries a Pete Droge sound with more of the white-boy hip-hop and then a fuzzed-up burst of punk for the chorus, which picks up on one of the recurring themes of the record:  money.  This theme is also explored on the poverty lament “Away From the Snakes.”  It’s a fitting tale to be told by a samples pirate, one who simultaneously renews and exploits the Never-Was:  “Us poor don’t get shit / Except shit on by rich men / And shit on by women / And shit on by everyone shitting.”