Metaphysics Dressed Down in an Overall: Home Before Dark

“Home before Dark” is a much loved Nits song. Usually played as one of the encores, with Nits gathering together at the front of the stage, close to their audience, it’s almost like a cosy campfire song. I love the video Nits made for it. It shows the true face of the song, which has a universal theme. It really belongs (and should have been included by now) in the traditional music library of pop folklore. It is a metaphysical song dressed down in an overall, enacted on the scene of a gas station. It is about time spent in darkness and strange, uncanny places, where you can feel the pain of your soul at its most acute. You count the hours till light. “Counting is an activity of the soul”, Martin Heidegger writes. Where there is counting, there is time. Where there is time, there can be music. Music is the art of time; it is an energy that moves along with time. It cannot be static, it moves with our soul and our soul moves with it. So does this song.

It synthesises different vibrations coming from all of our senses, under the threat, always lurking behind the corner, of darkness and fear of the unknown. The images of the clock and its hands frantically turning around in eternal circles, Rob and Robert Jan counting the time with their fingers, the bare-naked winter trees, the flash-light shining through a forest landscape, it’s all so deeply “Unheimlich”, sinister and eerie. The experience of beauty and the feeling of being at home somewhere are so ephemeral and fragile. Nits forged themselves so many aesthetic alliances on which to build their diaphanous, musical fortresses formed out of the concrete sensations offered by our senses. These conspiracies, especially with the plastic arts and the moving image-sequences of cinema, fed their imagination with endless possibilities, but also tainted their souls with the wind-blowing-through-the-bare-branches-of-a-tree melancholy, the dark side to which our senses also bear witness. How can the beauty of forms and colours make up something of such incomprehensible sadness? It is a question that is ever present in the musical pensiveness of Nits. And this song embraces this unfortunate duality so beautifully in the simple metaphor of getting home before the darkness sets in.

I look at the paintings of Edward Hopper, their colours and forms clearly delineated, the colouring is often bright, the mood somewhat lonely and somber. But the light is always a metaphor for hope, I suppose, Hopper made wonderful studies of how the light falls in a darkened room, through a window or on a street. The music of Nits behaves as a simulant trying to evoke our original experience of the world as closely as possible, through its patient, concrete references to our Lebenswelt. Their light in the darkness is the optimism of beauty that is ever present in their refined musical language of melancholy. Their positivity speaks through the reverence they show to the world (which is rather unique in the genre of pop music). Recognising beauty, and aspiring to recreate it, is always a reverence to the pleasure of being in the world. The album “Henk” has a few more of these, what I like to call “metaphysical” songs (I already wrote about “Under a Canoe”, which houses a simple philosophy of an idealised oneness between the man-made objects that are part of our daily lives and the bigger picture of all things natural that surround us). “Sleep (What Happens to Your Eyes)” is another one: the eyes and the soul so intimately connected; it expresses the beauty and concurrent sadness of belonging to someone, or of being a part of the world, but for an all too short period of time…This great beauty of a song, inspired by an enigmatic, allegorical poem of Goethe is really an exclusivity in the œuvre of Nits, it’s in a class of its own – in a Neoclassicist sound of synthesizers -, a piece of classic European literature adapted with flair and panache by another noble European soul… Goethe and Schubert. Tintoretto and J.C. Bloem on “Kilo”. They conclude the apprenticeship of Nits throughout several albums, their experimental studies in music, on how to incorporate a rich cultural heritage in their way of bringing musical soundscapes closer to the home of our souls. “Henk” was soon to be followed by several flawless masterpieces that would never deny their listeners a warm home of joy and beauty, always in a tender reverence to our world… “Here come the sunny days…”

(Such a pity that the quality of the sound and the images is so poor…)

Joke Roelandt, November 2019