Tim Fite has a problem. You see, Tim Fite makes country music. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is when you consider that he’s also a bit of a hipster, and hipsters hate country music as much as they hate big corporations and things with no ironic kitch value. Sure, they like George Jones and Loretta Lynn, but these are people so caught up in the societal merit of everything they can’t admit that “Beer for My Horses” is a great song in spite of the fact that Toby Keith is an asshole and most of his fan base is illiterate. So in the press release for Gone Ain’t Gone, you get this really involved description of this sampling technique Fite uses where he takes old bargain basement discs and … you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care about street cred or red states versus blue states or the fact that everyone wants to be considered hip-hop, even Fite, when he’s clearly nothing close to it, despite the fact that he calls out “Throw your hands in the air” toward the end of “Disgrace.” Let’s talk about this record as a collection of songs, not as a symbol of post-everything America.
See, Gone Ain’t Gone is a really good alt-country album. That’s all it is. I know, it’s got samples and spoken-word interludes, and parts of it sound punk and parts of it are danceable, and the press release specifically calls it “a hip-hop record that sounds like folk music,” but that just makes it an ambitious alt-country album. It does not mean that Tim Fite invented a genre. In fact, if the Dust Brothers had produced Beck’s Mutations, it would have sounded almost exactly like this, and Fite clearly owes a debt to Mr. Hansen, but to force comparisons isn’t fair to either artist, so I’m just going to let that drop, and for the second time, I’m going to make an effort to talk about the music here.
Basically, there are two kinds of songs on this record. We’ve got our straight-ahead Ryan Adams-style cry-along country songs, and our slightly genre-defying tunes with more of a debt to early Wilco. The latter are going to be the ones that end up on mixtapes, but it’s actually the former that make this collection such a cohesive, enjoyable whole. However, singles make stars, so let’s talk about those first.
“No Good Here,” is, apparently the first single, since you can download it off the web site. Fite plays the swaggering slacker over a backbeat that’s just a little too happy for his boasts about “quitting every job in New York City.” Still, the pulsing chorus and double-tracked vocals make this tune an excellent public face for the record. Later, “Shook” throws out synth drops and nonsense lyrics (“Golf cart lap dog / Take your polo”) to re-interpret Beck’s “Hollywood Freaks” for the Uncle Tupelo set (alright, I promise, no more Beck references), and even the tossed-off “If I had a Cop Show” manages to be humorous, despite also being completely tuneless.
For all of its attempts at buzzworthiness, though, it’s the most traditional songs here that mean the most. “A Little Bit,” “Mascara Lies,” “Not a Hit Song,” and “Forty-five Remedies” aspire to be nothing more than mournfully heartfelt, and in this they succeed admirably. All of this sentiment comes to a head on the final two tracks - the penultimate “Away from the Snakes,” which somehow manages to be poignant despite using the word “shit” literally dozens of times, and the closing “The More You Do,” which wistfully asserts that “There’s more to you when you’re alone.” Somehow, the two complement each other perfectly.
So that’s it. Tim Fite didn’t reinvent music, and that’s okay. Not everything has to be revolutionary, and most albums are better of without that kind of hype. It took a quality album to overcome a press release as misleading as this one, but Fite delivered. Enjoy this record because it’s good, and for no other reason. |