Early Morning: The Sound of Young Familiar Voices

This is the sound of young familiar voices accompanying my roller-skating and hair-in-pigtails days and later on my high school days, although I wasn’t aware of them at that time. I discovered Nits a year or so after “In the Dutch Mountains” was released, by chance, with the radio on. Studio Brussel played “J.O.S. Days” and I found myself immediately under the spell of the voice of a young Henk Hofstede, and not only of his voice, the music being equally compelling. I remember I was in the bathroom when they played the song, getting ready for another student day and I went into my room to be able to listen to the song from close-by and to find out who this remarkable music was from.

The way this song starts off is just so freshly simple and disarmingly sweet, revealing such an unfussy, uncomplicated and accessible everyday world. It also sounded so very joyous and jolly, none of the dark, dramatic or lovesick undertone of much of the eighties pop bands, but carefree and boisterous, just like I was in those days. And yet there was something profound about it too, difficult to pinpoint, but it would occupy my mind many years later still, trying to find out what it was exactly that makes this music so very peculiar. I knew right from that moment that what I had just heard was special, and unlike anything else I had ever encountered in my tender years of listening to pop music. From that moment onwards my discovery of the Nits world began.

Listening to the album ”In the Dutch Mountains” seems like the easiest way to fall in love with Nits, it was for me. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have known this music when I was younger, as a child, for I had been bewitched by music, especially pop music since a very young age, always singing and dancing to tunes, and recording music in the wee small hours of the morning. This is a bit the feeling I get listening to this new compilation: early morning, youthful, tender pop, such fresh springlike beginnings.

What surprises perhaps most of all when scrolling through the different songs is the immensely imaginative and varied energy that wades through the arrangements, the rhythms and structures of the melodies and musical forms. Nits, right from the start, showed themselves as a uniquely creative band with clean and well-defined, never messy songs, every one of them with its own clearly outlined identity. It’s a music of forms and ideas, different from the uniformity that characterises many a pop song. And stepping out of my bathroom I found myself entering a very concrete, tangible little world of people and things where I really felt at home, almost from the first moment. Some beginnings are so strong and intense that they lead to a lifelong romance…

I’m pretty sure my next trip in Nitsland was to those famous Mountains and then I took a hike back in time to listen to all I had missed in my younger childhood days. The difference with all of the other pop bands I knew and liked was indeed this alternative, idiosyncratic world they created in their songs, and the best thing about it was that it was not so very different from the world we know and live in everyday, it just added a magical, charming touch to it, that you never tire of. And it makes the world more limpid, see-through, poetical, beautiful. Nits combine beauty and joy in the way that Keats wrote. They turn potatoes, umbrellas, tents, shirts, tables and chairs, pencils into aesthetic shapes of music and kitchens, offices, cabins, mountains into earthly places of worship. I like that. A lot.

This new compilation of all their early singles (A & B sides) feels like the beginning of something new indeed, “New things are best”, just like spring. It was like the awakening of a world full of sleeping beauties.

I sometimes slip out of the bathroom again, just to listen, but never again did I make a discovery like back in 1988…

Joke Roelandt, August 2018