On a Monday evening in mid-Spring a crowd, largely comprised of young, unambiguously preppy heterosexual young women converged on King Tut’s for an evening of music.
By chance they encountered Pixel Fix, a four-piece from Oxford who are currently taking time out from uni to try out being a band.
Based on the strength of their songs and blending of influences (Foals, meet Burial) they might be on to something.
Worth a listen if you get the chance, they play with assurance and promise something interesting in the future.
Their attention to their music is endearing, as is their constant, mid-song requests to the sound tech to adjust levels; they sound just fine though, hopefully we can hear more in the future.
The highlight for most of the crowd though is Young Kato, who hail from the South West of England, theirs is the kind of soulless, pandering dross that gives YouTube musicians a bad name.
It’s worth taking a moment to ponder how any six people could assemble on stage and have so little to say with such volume-fortunately you have all the time in the world as you stare blankly past the nauseatingly self-involved frontman and try not to take in any more of the lyrics than you have to simply by being there.
‘Don’t Wait ‘Til Tomorrow’, ‘Something Real’, ‘Ignite’ ‘Help Yourself’, it’s like the song titles were taken from the chapters of a rejected self-help manual for the clinically banal.
This is music that comes ready to go for a Vodafone advert where ‘moments’ are harvested like cocoa plants.
The frontman’s self-involvement is almost as off-putting as his parody of showmanship: every motion dares us to imagine the inner superficiality of someone who asks himself “what might someone with passion do here?”
He’d earnestly cringe his shoulders together, or raise his hand in a messianic slow jig, or randomly shout whatever next asinine lyric rhymes with ‘feel’.
Why am I being such a dick to these guys? Because this is the kind of music you don’t have to try hard to find, bands like this masquerade as the real feelers of feelings, contrasted in their minds with bands like One Direction whose happiness doesn’t speak to their acid-grit experience.
What experience is that? No idea, let me write another five songs about despair, except they’re not so much about despair as that feeling you have when the alarm goes off in the morning and I’ll let you know, surely something’ll come (although there were six people on stage, it’s unlikely 600 of the same ilk would’ve helped).
Fuck this stuff, it’s pabulum, and we (everyone in that crowd who cheered) needs to be better than that, there’s nothing wrong with being ‘just’ happy, it beats the hell out of this pseudo-depth.
Words: Simon Jones
Photos: Stewart Fullerton
