PIXX - The Age Of Anxiety

“To put a name on it would be to nail the age of anxiety”. So sings 21 year old Hannah Rodgers in the very first line of I Bow Down, the opening track from this intelligent and soul-searching debut from PIXX. The solution to the stresses of modern living and the pressures in forming meaningful relationships may lie, Rodgers discovers, in looking inwards and backwards, revisiting and confronting childhood memories and dreams. These can then serve as metaphors for survival.

And therefore Toes pleads for time to think, Grip for the freedom to make choices. Romance yearns for purpose and commitment whilst Your Delight reveals the pain in long-distance love. In Waterslides life becomes a treadmill of alternating thrills and spills. Everything Is Weird In America applies to the vast emptinesses of everywhere. The Age of Anxiety is a beautifully constructed album, an electro-pop manifesto of self-examination, a search for identity tempered with hope and positivity. This is a collection that will strike a chord with many, and I will let you into a little secret. Fundamentally, those angsts and fears are still the same as when WH Auden published his poem of the same name way back in 1947.