“Yesterday’s Garden“
from the album Fair Ain’t Fair
2008
iTunes
It’s a shame Vaudeville died out nearly half a century before Tim Fite was born: He would have been a natural. The Brooklyn musician sings, he raps, he plays instruments, uses samples from obscure bargain-bin records and has been known to wear seersucker pants, with matching suspenders, pulled up well past his waist. Fite also has a searing wit and a strong sense of irony, which he combined to brilliant effect on last year’s scathing take-down of rampant consumerism, Over the Counter Culture. In keeping with the sentiment of the album, he made it available for free on his website.
Fite is back to a label release on Fair Ain’t Fair, a riotous carnival of sounds that finds his street-smart drollery in full effect on songs about consequences: of actions, of ideas and, ultimately, of being willing to apologize. Samples abound, but Fite uses them judiciously on what is his most musical, even pop-leaning, effort yet. There’s still plenty of his strident, often funny observational ranting — “I need to play more shows/ So I can buy more clothes/ So I can look like them folks who buy clothes,” he declares on “More Clothes,” a deadpan anti-consumerist relapse. But he shows a more tender side, too, singing in subdued tones over a simple guitar part on the folksy, elegiac “Harriet Tubman.”
The album is loaded with arresting musical touches. A woozy, carnival-esque waltz wheezes through “The Barber,” and percussion crashes on “Trouble.” Piano bobs gently on “Yesterday’s Garden,“ while “Big Mistake” finds an electric piano vamp playfully circling the steady acoustic guitar at the heart of the song. That song, in turn, is the heart of the album, for its backhanded message of forgiveness. Fair may not be fair, it seems to say, but don’t worry too much: Everybody screws up at some point. It’s what you do next that counts.