NITS - angst

It's often a bit unsettling to read those who sanctify historic bands, more or less openly declaring: "They don't make music like they used to." It's unsettling to read those who've lost the urge to discover, something perhaps deeper than simple, newfound disinterest in music. This, in truth, also happens to bands as groups of men and personalities more or less bored with the world or with themselves, and it's no less mortifying: how many times do you get the impression that a new record was released only because nothing better came along to do?

With Nits, as with other bands who have only ever brushed against real success, this has perhaps never happened. And this new album, "angst", their nineteenth and in fact the first "concept" record of their career, is perhaps the clearest proof of their renewed creative freshness (certainly more so than the chamber-pop crooning of "Malpensa").

"angst", dedicated to the Netherlands of the occupation and the immediate postwar years, translates that meaning-laden backdrop into pointillistic, nervous arrangements, geared toward a crisp alternation that doesn't shy away from redundancy, recreating a dusty hidden life, or one finally blossoming again (the late-period Go-Betweens feel of "Lits-Jumeaux", the brazenly carefree Beatles-esque indie-pop of "Flowershop Forget-Me-Not").

The album opens with "Yellow Socks & angst", a theatrical piece that morphs, in the chorus, into a Christmas-like refrain worthy of East River Pipe, set against a simple little organ (the same goes for the fluty notes and carefully dosed synths of "Radio Orange", which recalls the Eurocentric, decadent elegance of Apartments). It's also a more modest use of instruments that conjures the setting of a "life in recovery", with samples and tiny background noises almost bedroom-pop in style, lightening the slightly worn crooning of "Two Sisters". Memory thus resurfaces, surreptitiously, in glimpses of a "view haunted by ghosts" over the Canal Ring, as fog descends ("Breitner On A Kleider"), in the kraut elegy of "Along A German River", in the mockingly nostalgic wave of "Pockets Of Rain".

What emerges is a whimsical, Momus-esque picture, one that doesn't even bother trying to appear different from what it is, or perhaps, rather, is concerned first and foremost with appearing at all, in what is above all a sonic exploration in its own right, one that Nits seem to have taken up again with great vigor on "angst". Perhaps this is the band's secret, the thing that lets them keep sounding interesting even where, generally speaking, the songwriting creaks a little (melodically speaking, things largely remain more "functional" to the overall aesthetic design, with due exceptions).

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25/09/2017