Tiña’s debut album has moments of brilliance with some unfortunate issues
The debut album for London-based band Tiña, Positive Mental Health Music, is a modern psychedelic romp through musings on mental health, intimacy, and religion. Unfortunately, taken as a whole, it is a deeply conflicted album; there are songs on the record that offer interesting insights into the life and thoughts of the narrator, but there are also songs that feel painfully similar to each other and hit on a repetitive, dour mood.
The album ruminates on catastrophe and the narrator’s response to it, as well as their response to how other people are reacting. Songs such as the album opener “Buddha,” “Rooster,” and “Growing In Age” touch on spirituality as well as intimacy with another person. In “Growing In Age,” the line “It’s like a hug will kill us all” can be taken literally, as an especially relevant comment on today’s growing anxieties around illness and infection.
The opening track “Buddha” is a tour through the narrator’s everyday routine, offsetting prayer imagery with intimacy. While not a new concept, it does serve to set up one of the album’s major overarching ideas: that of connecting with somebody else. “New Boi” explores worries that a partner is cheating and the way bodies contain evidence of a life lived, with the opening, “My body is / holding stories of the last choice that I made.”
The album’s standout is “It’s No Use.” A quiet refrain with limited lyrics, mostly contained to repeating the title over and over again, it masterfully captures the resigned nature of giving up on something after a long time of working on it or thinking about it. It feels like a natural end point to the album, or a final beat before a slightly more uplifting closer. However, it is the third-to-last song, followed by two others that are not nearly as strong to close out the experience. At best this feels like a missed opportunity, and at worst it feels like song sequencing was not given as much attention as other aspects of the album.
Positive Mental Health Music’s instrumentation is not exactly bad; it fits the overall aesthetic of the album’s themes and feels appropriately retro, like a reference to an era in which psychedelic rock was more popular. However, there is little differentiation between the tunes or styles of most songs. The easiest way to tell the songs apart is through their lyrics, which when read through do offer interesting images to visualize and thoughts to meditate on. Some of their power is lost in the actual listening experience, as the singer doesn’t properly enunciate, or sings in an octave too high for their comfortable range — though these problems are often irrelevant, when the instrumentals overpower the vocals completely.
Despite all of that, the album feels largely successful if Tiña’s hope for it was, as stated on the opening track, “…that this song does something for someone / And if not at least I’ve got a song.” Positive Mental Health Music is a collection of songs that offers some chill vibes to coast off of while watching the world on fire. It has some memorable moments and some thought-provoking lyrics, but is held back by repetitive melodies and static vocals. While not a bad choice as a soundtrack for these increasingly dark days, there are albums from this year and from years past that touch on similar themes and emotions, albeit without the psychedelic bend. Tiña shows massive potential to bring about a resurgence of that sound, and it will be interesting to see their progression as a band.
