Go into any used-CD store and you'll undoubtedly see tons of old disks by forgotten also-rans, has-beens, and never-wases who have long since returned to their day jobs. Even marked down to $2.99, these albums will likely never sell, destined to haunt the cut-out bins and sale racks for eternity. Tim Fite's second full-length album and his major-label debut, Gone Ain't Gone, liberally samples some of these dusty artifacts into his songs and sonic collages, making them virtually indistinguishable from the live instruments. Whether he is rescuing or exploiting these works is debatable, but building off this type of pop culture effluvia is an intriguing, if not especially innovative, idea, especially considering how mp3s may make even used-CD stores obsolete. Fite's a collagist like the Avalanches and the Go! Team, for whom samples are their primary instruments, but like Beck, he's anchored to American music traditions like blues, folk, country, punk, and hip-hop.
"I Hope Yer There" kicks off Gone Ain't Gone with dark, trilling guitars that sound like dread-filled alarms, but Fite ruins the effect with his gummy down-home drawl and preacherly shout-outs, which add only bluster to his blues. He sounds like an avant-garde G. Love-- and going avant-garde is the only way G. Love could be worse. The remainder of Gone Ain't Gone, however, shows Fite to be a musical shapeshifter with an ambitiously broad repertoire of styles and sounds. He's at his best when he sticks to rock sources: "No Good Here" is jangly pop interrupted by blasts of loud guitar courtesy of some band called the Seymores, and "A Little Bit" bounces along on what sounds like a backmasked high-hat and waspbuzz guitar.
Throughout the album, though, Fite mixes his collage pop with false-sounding country hickisms and low-rent hip-hop exercises, which try to make a virtue out of their amateurishness. The territory between these two seemingly disparate genres has been well traveled by many artists (like Kid Rock, Bubba Sparxx, and, more recently, Cowboy Troy), and Fite doesn't have a whole lot to add except his foundational approach to sampling. That technique creates some interesting juxtapositions, such as the horn outro that caps the C&W; class lament of "Away from the Snakes", but more often, it feeds a persona that seems disingenuous and grating, especially on the stuttering raps that derail "I Hope Yer There" and "Forty-Five Remedies".
The pointless jokiness of "Cop Show" reveals Fite to be something of an ironist (apparently confirmed by his press photo, which looks like a bug-eyed portrait from a circa-1962 college yearbook), while the sound bites on "Toasted Rye" (unattributed) and "I've Kept Singing" (from Paul Robeson) suggest a) That the album's theme is race and music, and b) That Fite is out of his depth. The distance between him and his music-- a distance filled mostly with others' music-- opens up the possibility for malignant caricature, as if the hip-hop elements are often just one step away from blackface. It's probably unintentional-- despite its ramshackle aesthetic, the album has the worked-over precision of a true labor of love-- but that doesn't really diminish its ugly potential. In the end, maybe all of these musical elements were simply never meant to be squashed together on the same album with Fite's overplayed persona, which will likely doom Gone Ain't Gone to suffer the same obscurity as its inspirations. That's no great tragedy.
