Album Review Tiña - Positive Mental Health Music

To sound both retro and relevant is incredibly hard. Lean too heavily on the past and homage can become imitation, don’t go far enough and you end up being nothing more than a pub rocker in a paisley shirt. It’s risky business. Thankfully, ‘Positive Mental Health Music’ manages to land on the right side. Opener ‘Buddha’ sways you into a lowkey frenzy, ’60s keyboards humming along like a particularly wild Sunday afternoon, preparing you for what’s to come. ‘I Feel Fine’ and ‘Growing In Age’ prove that there’s more to psych than acid trips and stacked pedal boards. Cleaner-than-clean guitars mix with unnerving vocals to create a disturbingly magical atmosphere, one filled with equal amounts dread and wonder. While at times the album gets a bit too twee for its own good (‘Rooster’, we’re looking at you), on the whole Tiña have managed to create a debut record that quietly paves the way for modern psychedelic pop, and not a loud shirt in sight.