Wild-West Nits. (On the albums Doing The Dishes and Strawberry Wood)

The eighteenth shape is the kitchen sink

The album Doing The Dishes features two songs that are on my list of Nits favourites: “Grrr … To You” and “Cowboys and Indians”. The latter one sounds like saying goodbye to childhood dreams or to a childhood friend. It reminds me of a time when I was watching movies with my dad and sister, about cowboys and indians, or of memories of my nephews playing cowboys and indians and we were the squaws… It’s such a tender song ending with a quote from Emily Dickinson about hope and then Henk ending this melancholic song by a beautiful simile where hope and words fall down on our heads like rain… Rain as tears from the past … Memories … tears … rain …

“Grrr … To You” brings back some of my fondest memories of a Nits concert. The song was accompanied by a wonderful video in dark red and orange colours – if I remember correctly – of a group of people gathered together on a beach, perhaps – I’m not quite sure – the images just moving slowly, you couldn’t really make out any details of what you saw, of the people in it, there might have been some sort of a fire too lighting up – or was it just the sun setting?- it’s all a bit of a blur in my mind now, but I still think of it, see it before my eyes and hear the music. It was one of those moments of beauty that Nits create so effortlessly for the ears and their best friends, maybe, the eyes, cuddling up together as one. I particularly love the languishing expression of the feeling in the past continuous tense – “I was loving you” – which goes so well with the elastic, yielding sound rhythm of the prosody and the music. Not often does Henk Hofstede write love tunes, but when he does he knows how to express the nature of this emotion so perfectly in its musical equivalent. The longing for what has passed, in a lingering rhythm which from time to time is revived by a sparkle of a hopeful memory.

And that is precisely one of the fortes of Doing The Dishes: it is so beautifully cinematographic. Songs like “No Man’s Land”, “The Flowers”, “Lenin And The Wounded Angel” and “In Dutch Fields” and many others, tell a musical story in such colourfully described sketches that you can’t help but imagine the scenes in your mind’s eye, with plenty of protagonists straight out of history books, straight out of opera houses, palaces or movies, or epic war stories. It’s again this wonderful combination which Nits achieve throughout their work, of small everyday tales with the big stories of our world. Nits show once again their side of historiographers of recent and more remote pasts. While they are doing the dishes – their most phenomenological title for an album – and have one toe in the water, the bigger stories of our world unfold, larger-than-life characters appear in the lyrics of Hofstede. Even in the smallest scenes of a Nits song, history is always present in the background!

Doing the dishes is an at times playful at times serious musical history book that comes with pictures. The war stories are almost like epic poems in pocket-size format; epic stories of small war heroes. And the style of Nits is once more adventurous, with the energy of a wild-west movie or a crime movie with “violent” scenes or the fun exuberance of a comedy. We are once again in an episode of “Nits, The Movie” where big and small histories are portrayed the Nits way. As for the music itself it is as usual a communication with all sorts of musical paradigms, hard to encapsulate in one word, but I’d dare to say that in the wild-west way their music is lawless and Nits once more behave like musical outlaws, choosing musical freedom above anything else. In this respect the song “Moondog” could perhaps refer to the blind eccentric American composer and musician Moondog who had quite a revolutionary take on music and who also took inspiration from numerous styles of music. He was a wild man too … And there’s the line “When the moon struck one” which is also a song by The Band with a tragic story of friendship and loss. Loss and letting go are certainly central themes on this album. Doing the dishes is perhaps above all a free-roaming album where Nits loosen the reins and let their music gallop freely.

On Strawberry Wood Nits seem to feel melancholic about their own art, their own music for the first time. The album balances on well-known rhythms that lead to retrospection or a careful introspection of who they have become. Nits revisit one of their very first loves: The Beatles. What Nits share with The Beatles – beyond the insect name – is a natural genius to write songs, a certain playfulness and lightheartedness, an easy charm, a “jolly” lightness even when they touch on darker subjects, a sense of fantasy and the absurd while staying close to a familiar world. It is what I like about them so much. The no-fuss spontaneity with which they create the loveliest melodies and winding songs. Strawberry Wood brings out that Beatles vibe especially in the live performances of the songs on stage. When Nits play “Jisp” it’s easy to imagine a certain “Blackbird” flying around in the beautiful Dutch nature reserve … And Robs drumming on “Nick in the House of John” and “Tannenbaum” remind me of Ringo’s. I like the joyous nonchalance of “Nick in the House of John”, the insouciance and casualness with which Rob seems to play his drums, not unlike the cool and laid-back way of playing the drums that is so typical of Ringo. The sadness of “Departure” brings back memories of “For No One”. These are just some of the random associations that pop up in my head …

There is a sense of history – on this album as well – of the passing of time, in the world they have lived in – the bigger world far away and the intimate family circle close by – and they glide through it with a melancholia that sounds really sorrowful at times – which makes me sad anyway when I listen to the album – and which perhaps for the first time in their oeuvre, holds more resignation than beauty and hope. When I first heard the album there were moments that they seemed to feel at a distance from their own selves, losing their vivacious selves in somewhat monotonous, spiceless sounding pop. But with time I got to appreciate the comforting autumnal softness of its sounds…

One of the highlights of Strawberry Wood is “The Hours”, Nits’ sweet little philosophy of time, that ticks away, softly guided by Rob’s perfect timekeeping. I adore the lyrics that play with the shadow of time, the rain and the snow of the Nits world, the changing perception of lived-in time. “The Hours” is just one of those songs where Nits sound mostly like themselves. As delicate and fresh as spring blossoms and winter snow …

The album gets younger and fresher as we grow older …

Joke Roelandt, January 2025