Take this Nits Waltz …

Welcome to the next episode of my summer feuilletton on Nits albums.

With “Adieu, Sweet Bahnhof” I am once more treading on thin ice in Nits-album-ranking territory. But I like a challenge… A quick look at the index of songs and a furtive reminder through the ears, classify it as a possible Merchant-Ivory music production of a Nits album. The costume dramas of this well known house of film production often focus on the relations between people of different social classes, the pretence and hypocrisy of the upper classes, the struggles of the lower classes. This album has something aristocratic about it, something lush in the instrumentation, it is at times intellectual and theatrical. With posh upper class titles as “Adieu, Sweet Bahnhof”, “The Infant King”, “Villa Homesick” and “The Ballroom of Romance” contrasting with some more working-class epithets and subjects in “The Poor Man’s Pound”, “Fanfare” and “Vah Hollanda Seni Seni”. The sound of this album is somewhat unnatural (certainly for Nits standards) like the high-class, fancy characters in the Merchant-Ivory movies, but underneath these frilled arrangements, and layer upon layer of glam petticoat frocks, hide some very pure characters as well, I mean some very good, decent, music folk. There are still the more angular sounding songs as in the early Nits period and then a sort of careful transition to a more aesthetic, artful way of music composition. I’d like to undress these songs and imagine them brought to life by Nits on stage anno 2019. I think many of them would pleasantly surprise us. Like the unexpected, passionate kiss Lucy gets from her impetuous, uninhibited, unaffected suitor, named George, in “A Room with a View”. The natural theatrics of Nits on stage hardly ever fail in bringing to life the most modest sounding studio song; in this way they have caught me by surprise more than once. The compositions of Nits are never haphazard, and always full of ear-catching details, in the melodies, in the lyrics, in the atmospheres they evoke. “The autumn chapter of a novel” is such a moment that arises from between the horns and the synths in all its glory. It is again Henk at his prosodic best, his clear voice translating a tender melancholy that is hard to surpass, a music poetry that makes you shiver. And listen to the beginning of “Vah Hollanda Seni Seni”, it immediately grips you as a story that you want to listen to in all its details, beautifully told in different perspectives, different voices, different languages; the crystalline, female voices sketching lifelike, recognisable portraits of endearing, familiar situations and characters, an otherness in sounds, in voices, in identity that Nits so effortlessly know how to adopt into their own music language. It turns this stately exotic sounding song into a real gem of Nits identity; it is one of these songs that can tell a neophyte who Nits really are and what they stand for. The album contains other Nits essentials: the title song of course, “Adieu, Sweet Bahnhof”, this beautiful waltz of European languages, that has turned every train station into a place of worship for Nits aficionados. It’s how Nits like to travel, the romantic aristocratics of ancient train journeys that never end, the melting pot of different languages heard while rumbling through framed landscapes, the pipes and cigars, the accordions, the books, the melancholic thoughts a train journey inescapably evokes. The simple pleasure of a little adventure undertaken in-between some of Europe’s most-loved cities, in a quintessential European sound. If you’d ask me what Europe sounds like, I’d answer you: just listen to “Adieu, Sweet Bahnhof”… It represents both the aristocratic nature of our continent through the stylised format of the waltz and its popular side of a middle-class way of traveling accompanied by the sound of an accordion. A still-life seen through a train window, or at a museum, Nits stage them both in their melodiously traveling sound. It is, simply said, what Nits are all about.

And then there is this other mesmerising song about trains. When I used to travel between Brussels and London by train, I always listened to the same playlist I had assembled for my train journeys and the list started off with Michiel Peter’s magnificently royal “The Infant King”. It holds the mysterious sense of drama we all look for when setting out on a trip; a way of escaping, leaving behind, longing for something new or wanting to discover who we really are by a change of environment.The infant king looks like a baroque portrait of a traveler signed by Velazquez, majestic and enigmatic: the song wraps the traveler in a sort of gloomy tenebrism, his face somberly portrayed in the clair-obscur of his reflection in the window pane; the upbeat trainlike rhythm contrasted by the eerie, somewhat sinister vocal lines of Michiel, drowning in a sense of loss. A very peculiar, cinematographic atmosphere that seems to combine anachronistic images of different periods in time, just stunning! Speaking about time, there is something of a whiff of old European decadence, of a gone by glory hanging over this album, an atmosphere of an old, stiff, but luxurious world, even in the title song, but also in other songs like “Villa Homesick”, “Ballroom of Romance” and “Mask”. With this last song, we surely find ourselves in a rather posh theatre; the big drums and the horns, or saxophones in other versions, announce a bombastic spectacle of some kind, but they don’t sound very convinced, they hesitate between pride or shame, you can hear some sort of downfall very clearly further up in the live version of the song. Again a slight perfume of old-world decadence and masquerade, in a somewhat sluggish rhythm. This theatrical side of Nits maybe appears here on this album for the first time rather outspokenly; there will be other numbers smelling of the theatre, such as the buoyant “Port of Amsterdam” and the rumbling stomach of “An Eating House”. The album fades out in a refined courtship of a ballroom dance. For one last time you can hear the ruffling of the skirts while they sweep over the polished wooden floors, it is a song I’d like to dance to in a whirling pas-de-deux with a fine leading companion who knows how to dance lavishly in the old European way, in a palace of crystal and diamonds. For now I’ll have to be content with a stiff broom while mopping the kitchen floor …

Well, I think that “Adieu, Sweet Bahnhof” is certainly a Nits defining album. Nits are somewhat like George in “A Room with a View”, natural but elegant, passionate, free-spirited, traveling through Europe, but staying true to themselves. Nits more and more profiles itself as a band exploring its European roots, reviving the character of an old lady in this newly found musical inspiration… A love affair that will be more fulfilling and fruitful, longer lasting than the one they had with a certain – although it must be said a rather enticing and exciting – “Woman Cactus”… Nits would leave behind the more angular cubism of Picasso for a more rounded, balanced and mature, but fresh picture of Dame Europa. Re-listen to this album, it tells of Nits’ history…Listening to different albums of a band like Nits shouldn’t be about liking or disliking, nor about ranking them, but about discovering little idiosyncratic histories of distinctive music universes…

I chose the old “costume drama” video of “Adieu, Sweet Bahnhof” for obvious reasons relating to Merchant-Ivory (although from a different era), and also for its naive decadence… What a pity that all these old videos Nits made a long time ago are not available in a better, clearer format.

Joke Roelandt, August 2019