New Wave Outpost Forum

Another Friday and another episode of "Please help 'ol Rx learn about the rare of obscure..."

This week's contestants:

Neats
Neon Judgement
Nice Strong Arm
Nits

Anyone? Bueller?

Neon Judgement were a Belgian Synthpop band which made a few great records in the 80's.
Check out the video i just uploaded on YouTube to get an impression of what they were all about.... Enjoy !.
Neon Judgement - Tomorrow In The Papers (Belgium Tv-Studio 1983).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rFQoV_ZeuU

[quote][i]Originally posted by react010[/i]
<br>Neon Judgement were a Belgian Synthpop band which made a few great records in the 80's.
Check out the video i just uploaded on YouTube to get an impression of what they were all about.... Enjoy !.
Neon Judgement - Tomorrow In The Papers (Belgium Tv-Studio 1983).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rFQoV_ZeuU

[/quote]

My thanks react! That's pretty good stuff, in a Camouflage. I'll try to track some more of that down.. Thanks again[:)]

The Nits (or Nits as they are now known) have been one of my favorite bands for nearly 25 years.

The are a Dutch band but sing in English. Their musical progression was similar to XTC's. They began as a quirky, guitar/keyboard based band with excellent songwriting from Henk Hofstede and Michiel Peters. As the band progressed, they began to transform into a more 'earthy' sounding band. Less 'keyboards' but more piano, and less quirky but more atmospheric. And for the first 20 years of their career, they didn't record the same album twice.

There was an indi album released near the end of the '70s, but I'll just discuss their CBS recordings since those are readily available for all to listen to.

The albums Tent, New Flat and Work show a band maturing in their quirks, with Work being a much darker album than the two previous ones. By the time of Kilo and Omsk, they had hit their stride with better songs, fuller arrangements and more confident performances. The fact that keyboard/piano whiz RJ Stips had joined the band by this time helped the band immensely.

Adieau Sweet Bahnhoff was the most commercial album of their career thus far and contains enough gems to buy a small continent.

With Peters leaving the band after that, they recorded the album Henk which was less commercial but just as good as anything else they'd released.

In The Dutch Mountains was next and earned them a bona fide hit in Europe with the title track. This was guitar and keyboards again, but not like you'd expect. Stips is so creative with his style and sounds that you don't really think of his keyboards as 'keyboards'. They are icing on the cake, the cover of a book or whatever you want to call it. They are there, holding everything together, but you don't think of them as 'synths'....kinda hard to explain.


Then there was the Hat EP and the 2CD live set URK and that was the end of the '80s. In the '90s, the band kept reinventing themselves over and over again, with each album sounding like the Nits without sounding like a Nits album.

The latest three albums Wool, 1974 and Les Nuits are perhaps their weakest efforts although they are quite good. Their artiness has overtaken their melodic side and they've been treading the same sounds since the milennium started but remain better than most bands out there. They are just not very good NITS albums when you're used to almost 30 years of mind-boggling greatness.

SPAZ
Born of innocence. Free of ignorance.

What Spaz said!!!!!

Nits are on of my favorites with In The Dutch Mountains one of my all time favorite songs!!

Speaking of Dutch bands starting with "N"..

Nova were a synthpop band with the central European synth sound like Space. Their best known track, Aurora, was a number one hit in the Benelux.

Another well-know song, Terranova, appeared on the New Wave Complex range of compilations.


--

"As chairman of the Cradle of Filth fanclub I'm the most insensitive man in Britain, but even I can see there's tension there"