Ain't Ain't Ain't, Tim Fite's first album for Anti- in some years after a series of concept-heavy self-releases, is nice enough. It's a collection of spindly, shuffly, sorta countryfied indie rock, with the genial, slightly goofy Fite cracking wise over top. It's a long way from his one-man answering service days with Little T and One Track Mike-- of turn-of-the-millenium mtvU staple "Shaniqua"-- and even his earlier salvaged-from-samples solo work. Fite's often overeager delivery and anything-goes genre pastiche frequently felt like it was bending over backward to impress, an overall itchiness that the warm, worn-in Ain't seems to correct. Though his gradual shedding the sub-Odelay cornballery that plagued much of his earlier work has done wonders for Fite in the past, Ain't finds him a bit unsure as to how he'll replace its abundance of personality without going full Adbusters with it, as he did on last year's anti-consumerist Over the Counter Culture. So while this record rarely proves less than pleasant, its muted melodies and the jittery lyrical juvenilia rarely feels like too much more. Basically, Ain't finds Fite making that classic nice-guy mistake: confusing being nice with being interesting.
The album gets going with "Hold Me All Night", with Fite pitching a sweetly naive sort of woo over a traipsing, backporch-ready melody. These dusty lanes are where Ain't fares best; Fite's rural roots may've shown through a little too well on his earlier yes-y'alling, but he's found an easygoing way with country not unlike that of Seattle sunburners the Cave Singers. Fite's voice is still plenty chameleonic; at times he comes close to approximating the rich husk of TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone, while other moments find him sliding into the deadpan skitter of Soul Coughing's Mike Doughty. Here, Fite's vocal shapeshifting's is more relaxed, more palatable; you might not always dig what the guy's saying, but you'd be hard-pressed to mind the guy who's saying it too terribly much.
And Fite says plenty on Ain't; trouble is, it's not always clear what exactly he's getting at. Scant on detail and prone to unlikely flights of fancy, Fite's Ain't lyrics travel from the mundane to the just plain daffy so quickly-- sometimes in the course of the same song-- you start to wonder whether even he knows what he's on about. Fite's lovable-loser routine's certainly his most coherent; he reminds us on the loungy lead-in to "Bunnies" that "whoever keeps the score knows I haven't scored for a while," and that slightly dour, largely unexplained mood hangs over a good bit of Ain't. But in propping up all that sadsackery next to the easy, breezy timekiller "Joyriding" or the weird whimsy of "Tiger Shopping", Fite's message, such as it is, feels muddled, operating on its own peculiar whims; he may no longer be literally trying on as many voices, but Ain't still seems to favor quirkiness over cohesion, and seems to think that merely hinting at his own outsider status is enough to get the listener in his corner.
With at least two songs about honest-to-God bullying-- the bland aspersion-casting of "Bully" and the grislier, name-naming "Girard"-- and another, "We Are All Teenagers", that gently gnaws at the shackles of youth, it's clear Fite's looking to connect with the indoor kids here, but something about the thirtysomething Fite's junior jumble feels a little forced. Sure, bullying's no joke, and being 19 is its own kind of drag, too. But Fite's not really adding anything to that conversation here beyond the suggestion that he, too, has been there; at that age, you take your allies where you can get them, but that first Violent Femmes album this isn't. And when Fite starts sputtering on about "the lining of the silver lining" on "Girard", or quite literally detailing the purchase of a jungle cat on "Tiger Shopping", what separates this music from, say, Raffi isn't always clear. Affable even when he's down, Fite plays the nice guy through it all: tangent prone, slightly neurotic, relatably dorky. But between the innocuously rambly music, Fite's toned-down vocal mannerisms, and this pencils-up-the-nose persona, Ain't is a record that's hard to dislike, but nearly impossible to imagine loving. "We are all teenagers," Tim Fite offers, "waiting on the day when we won't be teenagers." Are we, though? In the end, Ain't Ain't Ain't exposes a painful truth about guys as nice as Fite: They don't often finish last, but plenty wind up somewhere in the middle.
