Is Tropical are very busy lately with the release of “I’m Leaving” and the album launches took place everywhere : London, Paris, Berlin, Switzerland and more. They also did a bunch of acoustic sessions and interviews on radio such as Gigwise, LeMouv, OuiFM, and Noisey released their two video reports about their tour in Mongolia.

Even Graham Norton, renowned Irish comic presenter, loved their album. Check it out :

You can order “I’m Leaving” on iTunes and on RoughTrade. And here is a little track by track review by Simon himself, telling you the stories behind the album. Stream the album on the Youtube playlist while reading it :

LOVER’S CAVE

Whilst playing a show on the beach in Anglet, southern France, we got told about a Lover’s Cave. 2 young lovers went into this cave, a poor orphan and a daughter of a rich farmer, for a bit of romance but got swept out to sea when the tide came in. Strangely enough I also copulated in the very same cave just hours before getting told about this.

DANCING ANYMORE

This song initially started out as a jokey acoustic guitar folk song, with the lyrics just being a playful argument between me and my girlfriend, but when we started to demo it suddenly it didn’t sound so jokey. Kirstie (Fleck) has never sung in her life, I forced her to put the female vocal part down as it’s a personal story about how I never dance, and when she did see me dance, she would never take me dancing anymore. Her vocal take on the demo had a certain charm that Luke Smith really wanted on the record, and thought was important to capture so that you can hear the fragility in the conversation, it wouldn’t work with a trained singer belting it out.

We really wanted the theme of the song to be evident in the way the song was put down, it had to have a danceable drum beat and bass line, and we wanted the vocals to be repetitive, almost like a loop from a 90’s dance song. We made sure that all the instrumentation and vocals were put down in full takes, as opposed to actually looping anything to give it an organic, human element. We had various shorter edits of the track but decided to keep it over 5 minutes so that we could really make it build throughout, and transform from a seemingly very stripped back live song into a full-on synth based dance track.

LILITH

‘There’s a really interesting and sinister story behind Lilith, the original wife of Adam in the Old Testament. Despite being created from the same earth as Adam and intended as an obvious counter-part to that infamous apple-fancier, she surprised everyone by running off with the Archangel Gabriel instead. This affair caused a bit of upset with the Guy Upstairs and Lilith was henceforth demonised in subsequent cultures as a corrupter of mankind, a baby-snatcher, and eventually became portrayed as a ring-leader for all sorts of malign forces.

I thought it was interesting how her origins seemed to suggest an original presumed equality between women and men in God’s mind, and to illustrate how God subsequently making Eve from the rib of Adam could be a sort of apocryphal punishment for giving Lilith the free-will to reach beyond her fated purpose. By using sort of mundane lyrics to tell her story, I wanted Lilith to shrug off the centuries of stigma that have become attached to her, and to give her a new relevance as a free-spirited and interesting contemporary woman. The style of the song also alludes to The Paranoids, who are a fictional band from The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon’s books often draw on classical mythologies by placing their axiomatic characters within the mundanity of everyday life. Similarly, pop music works best when it’s able to present strong symbolism in an everyday way.

LEAVE THE PARTY

This song, like many others we wrote leading up to the album, is about death. In the way that you don’t want to miss out on things yet to happen. The original demo was a little more upbeat with a sample of a submarine and an owl on it, Luke Smith rightly removed this. There’s another verse for it that didn’t make the cut which we will be used in sessions, to give the song more depth.

CRY

One morning ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, The Cure, came on the radio and I remembered how much of a great song it was. I love the statement of a boy crying, all your life you’re told you shouldn’t cry, especially as a boy. It ended up getting written in a day, only one bridge was added for the final version after our manager told us to listen to more Roy Orbison.

SUN SUN

The feel on this was inspired but Johnathan Richman, the way he would sing about old French masters and ice cream. The opening line was about spending all your money on Parfaits, the layered desert, but Luke heard me wrong when i first sung it and the lyric ‘bad things’ stuck. We wanted it to sound English so it ended up having a Kinks/Coral vibe. The bassline has that Scouse feel that is the groove of the track. The whole song is meant to be taken in a nonchalant manor, where as the rest of the album is heart felt and serious. This track almost didn’t make the album but I’m so glad it did.

VIDEO

Dom had a chord pattern he’d put down on a synth as a loop, and I kept hearing it through the walls for days on end. Without him even knowing I’d recorded it onto our flip camera and was sat in the next room trying to write riffs and melodies to go over it. When I had bits for it I was sat playing them (without his synth part) and he started writing back over what I’d done not knowing it was for his song. Eventually we had enough parts to construct the song. Again we wanted the vocal melody to have a looping feel to it that didn’t really go anywhere, but allowed the chord pattern underneath it to change, creating the illusion that the vocal melody had changed. We ripped the audio from the camera footage and named the file ‘Video rip’, which was misinterpreted as ‘R.I.P Video’ this title was enough to inspire the subject matter of the song. I used the end/death of video cassette or tape in general as a metaphor for relationships and how people so easily let go of things that were once really special or relevant in their lives.

ALL NIGHT

This is a happy love song that we wanted to focus on grove, not have all these indie chord changes and bridges ect. just one looping baseline. In the studio we also came up with a jazz backing vocal that was so risky it got transposed to a pitch bending guitar. It wasn’t planned for Ellie Fletcher to sing on the chorus of this track but after the great job she did on Yellow Teeth we asked if she would give it a go. This also nearly didn’t make the album but now is tipped for a single.

TOULOUSE

This was another song that ended up sounding completely different to the demo version. We didn’t just want the guitars to sound standard so we ran them through Luke’s (secret) modular synths and took interesting loops from the results to construct the guitar parts. This meant that a lot of the riffs in the original demo no longer had a place in the song, so were discarded. The song title has nothing to do with the lyrical content whatsoever, we started demoing the track on the road when we were in Toulouse and it just stuck. The lyrics are about watching a loved one die, and realising that nothing you ever had changed anything in the grand scheme of things ‘my gums still bleed, though your heart stopped beating’. It’s about being insignificant and being totally cool with that.

YELLOW TEETH

We always knew this would be the album closer. I wrote the chorus and middle 8 to a very electronic track and it didn’t really work. Gary had a great melody for a verse and we built the song again with more of a 70’s Crimson And Clover feel. As we started the studio version we shifted the key and so needed a new guide vocal that was put down in the control room. Luke didn’t end up getting me to do another take, maybe you could hear the desperation in my voice as it was the same day my girlfriend broke up with me and made me homeless.