About the Nits album “Les Nuits” (2005), a dark diamond worth discovering if you don’t know it yet…

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Je ne vous ai pas encore écrit sur “Les Nuits”, pourtant un de mes albums préférés des Nits. Having grown up in the outskirts of Brussels, but in a Flemish community, I know all about a split linguistic personality. Furthermore I studied at a Flemish university still bearing the scars of a little language war, trying to free itself from domination by the French tongue. And as I attended many a Nits concert at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, and at Le Botanique, (and occasionally in France) I know all there is to know about Henk’s French language skills. They are, to say the least, eccentric, imaginative, poetic, funny, charming, desperate sometimes, willing, and always very partial, a bit what we as Flemish are used to when hearing our French speaking compatriots try their hand at the Flemish counterpart of the Nits language. All this sounds perhaps a bit pretentious and that’s not at all what I want to suggest here; I don’t have a higher opinion of people who are fluent in more than one language. It is WHAT you are saying that counts, not in how many different languages you can say it. But Nits like all kinds of diversity, also linguistic diversity, as part of their European conviction and attitude. Hence “Les Nuits” and a few other titles or song lines written in another European language, French or German mostly. Talking about diversity, I have often found this album(“Les Nuits”) a bit weird, and indeed composed of very diverse songs. And maybe it is because of the murder of Theo Van Gogh that is haunting these Nits nights, but I always thought it is maybe one of their darkest albums indeed. And, what’s more, in its dark slumber it harbours my all-time-all-places-all-circumstances favourite Nits song, “The Eiffel Tower” a splendid and atypical achievement on a touristic, wandering exploit. Once more the strength of this Nits album lies in the fabulous and delicate details which both constitute and surround the beautifully crafted compositions. “Les Nuits” is as conventional a pop album as Henk’s French is a standard for achieving fluency in the gallic language. Nits don’t do standard, they don’t care for it, they are not interested in this kind of fluency. The difference is what they are after, the peculiarity of something, its uniqueness. But it is the kind of pop (following on from The Beatles for sure) that I wish there was more of, adventurous to the ears, wavering around in a part of our consciousness, that is not the clear, daylight sort of awareness, but the one that houses confused, obscure, ambiguous, nebulous nightmares by day and unsettling, directionless dreams by night. Many of the songs and the lyrics seem to refer to a dazed and confused state of waking up after a bad dream or an unpleasant, almost surreal experience. But their musical optimism as ever shines through the sometimes painful and sad histories this album recounts. Even in the dark, Nits always seem to find a way to make light, at least musically, of the most horrific events. The album also feels somewhat theatrical through its narration of dramatic scenes. Their muse sure takes on the costume of a “drama queen” – but in a good way, she is still, above all, fun and tender – from time to time on this album; Nits are never afraid to follow the outwash of their musical meanderings and still it all fits so well together in the soft, malleable interior of every song, never forced, but like meltwaters (or tears maybe…) finding their way naturally through a musical landscape, beautiful soundscapes set up by Robert Jan and Rob. There’s lots of drama showing through the melodies and the climactic construction of some of the songs, especially in “The Launderette” and “The Hole, and the elastic, pliable nature of the typical Nits song is stretched even more. It’s nice to see how they play with the composition and the construction of their songs in a Beatlesque way. In a slumbering wakefulness, in between dreaming and reality, they shape their own particular music language on this album, a very distinctive variation on the well-known tradition of pop sounds. A well thought out European music language, one of a kind…  Their music makes us feel at home in a European mixture, a mishmash of different languages and national identities. Henk’s above all charming way of expressing himself and addressing his audience in the spontaneous, direct way that he does is only reaffirming the richness and uniqueness of identity and difference we Europeans value and treasure… “Et toi, tu es, le jour, la nuit…”. “Les Nuits” feels like a golden slumber, like a smile that awakes you when, once again, you see the rising sun… “Once there was a way to get back home…”

I added a video of the Malpensa song Schwebebahn, a song that I like a lot and that plays not only with the German language, but also with German history and its particular pop tradition…

Joke Roelandt, June 2019