A press release for Tienas’ new album reads as follows : “Tienas’ O (Deluxe) plays like a late-night drive through the fragmented corridors of the self—windows fogged, thoughts unfiltered, heart cracked open and left leaking on the passenger seat. The album is equal parts diary, drug trip, and defiant scream, stitching together vulnerability and bravado with glitchy production and knife-sharp lyricism. The record is a deeply personal and emotionally volatile body of work that documents Tienas’s psychological and spiritual unraveling. It is a patchwork of personas: the romantic, the recluse, the cynic, the nihilist.” It sets one up for high expectations – and going into the 44 minute long record, I am intrigued and preparing myself to be let down, simultaneously. One track in, and I know I am not going to be.
O ( Deluxe) is impressive. 14 songs long, it is honest, and riveting. The artist skips between sounds, turns and twists his voice into knots, and goes through a sojourn himself. For the most part, he is not inviting you in. The album is so deeply personal, in a way, that you know right away that the artist does not really care about making himself comprehensible or pliant, he is cross-stitching across himself as an open wound and he does not expect you to really dial in with assistance. The album is disjointed at times, unravelling into several different threads of directions, before tying itself back into an eccentric, but coherent tapestry.
Rude Boy, the second track on the album is clever, and reminds me of a Shutter Island era Jessie Reyez, – he is working himself on a record scratch of sorts, the arrangement is simple, and you are primarily meant to listen to him speak, than pay attention to the snare drums in the background. It is also one of those tracks on the album which stops the album from spiralling beyond a point of no return. Another track on similar lines of reconciling with his ego is Killing Joke, which is quite visceral in itself — and these act as music track-shaped breathers from the sharpened nature of the breakdown that builds up on the album.
One of my favorite tracks on the album is Doistillbelieve, which features Specter, Rushaki and Eddy Da 14th. The whole project is this continual struggle between dichotomies of hope and resignation, rage and emptiness, exhaustion and egomania. Doistillbelieve leans towards the edge of the spectrum rooted in despair – or perhaps admittance. Specter’s first verse is revelatory :
Infatuated by my nightmares, really scared for my dreams
Walked quite the distance, realized
It is not what it seems
Some doing it for attention, I’m doing it for the peace
They breathe free after stabbing souls while my heart don’t really beat
How does it feel?
when the tip of the pen don’t navigate on the paper
And the melting pot I’m living in drives my thoughts up into vapour
And the tongue so blunt been stating facts but failed in front of a saber
And my head just dropped to save your pride, otherwise nothing in your Favour.
Confrere has an almost Kendrick Lamar-esque opening, melting into a Swae Lee esque production, – and this is where you kind of realize that this is characteristic of Tienas, all of these contemporary comparisons contextualize him and his art, you can hear the MF DOOM influence all over the album– but also the intermixing of every element occurs at such a profound degree that you become comfortable enough to identify his own signatures, his own characteristics. As the track opens up into a screaming panic attack – you do Tienas in his fullness, as the artist, as the person, and all that lies beyond the categorization.
There are many standouts on this record – Rain Song is quite masterful, and so is Cheap Drugs and Alcohol. The thing about Tienas is that he navigates personas and alter egos [re: Gunda], but what you do realize as his listener, is that he has placed so much of himself in every facet of himself that it is almost like he has cut himself into multiple different selves and they have managed to survive in the co-existing parallels of time on their own. For one, you, the listener, and he, the artist are united in one thing – disassembling and reassembling pieces of everything that has been laid out, the past, present, and future – which belong partially to both of you, and to no one at all, in totality.
