“Work” or the Fabrications of the Mind

A few weeks ago I walked into a vinyl record store in Ghent, just curious to see if they’d stock any Nits albums. And they did, six of them: “Tent”, “New Flat”, “Work”, “Kilo”, “Adieu Sweet Bahnhof” and “Henk”. I took them all home, even if I didn’t posses a record player, but my birthday was coming up soon. I was especially enchanted about finding “Henk”. Some of my favourite Nits songs are on that album, but their “entourage” could be better and they don’t sound their best on the cd I have. I was curious to find out if they’d sound any better on vinyl… I played “Kilo” first, a wonderful album in my opinion, although I’m still not sure what “Your next tyres” is doing there…? I find it somehow disturbs the subtlety of an otherwise very elegant album. I have the same feeling with “Crane Driver”, “5 Hammering Men” and “Erom On” (I know this is a popular song though) on “Henk” ; they give me writer’s block when I make my umpteenth attempt to write about “Henk”. I’ll close my eyes to “Cabins”, although I’m not a fan of this song either. But let’s focus on the good now, the excellent even.

I need to write you about “Work” first. This unpraised masterpiece of the young Nits with Michiel Peters in a star role.

Before Nits cautiously – one little step at the time – turned into poets of pop, they were thinkers first, workers of the mind. Analysts of pop, explorers of pop, architects of pop (as on “New Flat”). “Work” is a showpiece of clever, thinking pop. Perhaps this album is the paragon of Nits’ intellectual side, it sounds studious, serious, the product of a dense concentration, with Michiel Peters as the worrier of pop on duty, guided by his sensitive intelligence. You can see them pictured in deep thoughts on the album sleeve , thinking about the state of the world and their place in it, perhaps about the direction their music should take… Michiel had always been the critic of our society, the critical observer, the intellectual maybe. Nits would need to lose him in order to push through a more poetic view on life, more carried by the drive and the eye of fantasy than the eye of reason. Henk Hofstede would of course supply the heart and mind of the poetic soul; he knows, as no other in the language of pop music, how to translate his sense of fantasy and his romantic way of viewing the world – almost from the privileged position of a bystander who looks but never judges, whose soul somehow seems to be able to surpass all that is bad in the world he encounters, from an unpractical, irrational, dreamer’s point of view, like an otherworldly, visionary poet, – into images that picture the sort of reality that is captured in the many aesthetic forms of our European culture and our way of life. And what is more, he sees mostly the good in it, the beautiful, the innocent, the funny, the lighthearted side of it; the soft melancholy is as far as he wants to explore the darker side of the musical spectrum. Not Michiel, I think.

But for now the analytic reasoning, the sombre analyses in songs like “Umbrella Army”, “Buildings”, and “Red Tape” prevail, with the coldness of feelings like estrangement and alienation dominating this wonderful, dark piece of reasoning that is “Work”. It is as if we were in a world of numbers and mathematical equations that don’t allow for too many adornments. “Slip of the Tongue” proceeds in an almost rigid, disciplined manner as the laws of logic do, careful not to make any frivolous sidesteps. The whole album exhumes this severe, disciplined approach to music, in a rather charming way though. I myself am also somewhat analytical by nature, so I absolutely love the understated cool of this record. But this distant way of reason would have to go; later on in their work it would no longer define Nits’ character. After Michiel left – with Henk taking over on the album “Henk”, which was probably not accidentally named after the definite frontman of Nits, things will get a little bit more cheerful; the mainly social critique of the world we live in, will be replaced by a phenomenological view on things, yes, “things” will become more and more important, the objects of ordinary life and of art, and the day-to-day experiences we have alongside them, living in a material world of nature and inanimate objects. It is interesting to think about how this very peculiar way of looking at our world, certainly in music, came to be. Was Michiel’s dissatisfaction with the world a necessary element for Nits to transform into these phenomenologists of pop? The feeling of alienation is of course the feeding ground for a change of perspectives and possibly for choosing the phenomenologist’s way of a fresh, new, clear view on life. Starting out from your own individual little world. And being determined to make it a beautiful, charming view, one full of limpid images of innocence and goodwill, and of an aesthetic melancholy of musical forms and lyrical poetry which would become the essence of Nits. Nits would become poets of beauty. They would paint the world in light pastels, and even the darker moments of history they would choose to portray them without getting too sombre or mournful. Their music language aspires to speak of optimism and hope.Their latest album “angst” is of course a fine example of this. It reminds me somewhat of the movie “La Vita è Bella”; for Nits, music should always be like the image of the gramophone playing loudly out of the loudspeakers in the concentration camp, spreading hope, beauty, kindness, pleasure and humanness. Maybe I am wrong, but I think we owe this very idiosyncratic view of the world mostly to Henk.

But Michiel is a brilliant song writer. In his iconic “Tables and Chairs” he creates an intriguing duality of sound that transforms from conflict into reconciliation, perhaps symbolic of a deeply rooted longing to make peace with the world, to leave his unease with the world behind. When you hear the melody of “Buildings” you wouldn’t have a clue that it holds such a depressing message. His melodies are often cuddly and warm, a bit esoteric even, they seem to be wanting to take us away from the rational world, but then his thinking mind always catches up with him in his lyrics. There seems to be a struggle between Michiel’s at times dreamy music sequences, his soft, empathetic voice and then his lyrics of estrangement and unease, even despair. It’s as if his music tries to escape from the dreariness and alienation in his wording. His songs often display some sort of “mathematical fluency”, a studied structuredness, which is very different from the coloured compositions of Henk. “Umbrella Army’ seems to have taken over the monotonously repetitive sounding discipline of an army of workers. It’s this type of a cool and collected sound that is so typical of “Work”. But sometimes, very prudently, Michiel tries to soften his rational thinking, puts it on hold, as in little escapist songs like “Hobbyland”, a miniature of let’s say mathematical poetry…of a sweetly clever mind. “Man-Friday” has the same effect on me . It has a very strange cerebral melancholy in it of disorientation and loneliness, but such beauty too! It boasts the kind of “static”, almost stagnant rhythm of numbers that is so typical of Michiel (I am very fond of those disciplined, serious rhythms he develops – alongside Rob Kloet – in his songs on “Omsk”, “Spirits Awake” and “Man of Straw”, nothing luscious or voluptuous about them).

“Hands of the Watch” is another favourite of mine and already announces the forlorn poetry of “Kilo”. You can feel Henk’s longing for Italy, for the lavish, sumptuous colours and forms he already seems to be missing and although the song sounds rather sad, it is more a nostalgia for beauty that makes it tick. I chose the song “Empty Room” to illustrate this text, a brilliant, intricate network of energetic composition. Henk clearly needs air and light, wanting to flee from the claustrophobia of a neatly accomplished, assiduous work. More and more his future compositions will be filled with exactly those two ingredients, the air of nature and the light of a natural or pictured world… Nits’s songs will hold the limpidity and clarity of both of them.

Joke Roelandt, September 2019