Send "Tropics " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Tropics mastermind Chris Ward is a voracious and accomplished student of sound. Parodia Flare is the British twentysomething's full-length debut as Tropics, and it's made of compellingly lush and languid bits of sonic material culled from a vast array of sources, including touchstones as disparate as synth-pop, Balearic, Britpop, dubstep, African guitar-pop, and goth. Ward demonstrates an impressive sensitivity in picking out elements of these genres and styles that can be pieced together in ways that are texturally satisfying and often beautiful.But, ultimately, what is he building? That's the question that gets Ward stuck at times throughout the album. For the most part Ward wants to make pop music here, albeit a pop that's refracted through layers of wistful haze and humidity. Ward sings on most of these tracks, yet while his voice does have a pleasantly boyish, Damon Albarn-esque quality at times, little-to-zero effort is invested in making the vocals anything more than another quietly pretty element floating through the mix. So it's up to Ward's soundscapes to communicate any sort of urgency or momentum or drive. When they do, the results are both intoxicating and memorably tuneful. Parodia Flare's first proper song, "Mouves", features a pretty affectless vocal turn, but fortunately gets carried by thrumming bass and steady drums to a neat little hook of pulsing tones. In this context, the track's decorative elements, all its chimes and soupy synths, don't have to worry about carrying the song and can serve their ideal function as colorful embellishment....full text |
| Residentadvisor |
| When Tropics first debuted on Planet Mu with the Soft Vision EP, the project seemed like an agreeable if unremarkable take on '80s baiting chillwave. Maybe not the most distinctive music ever, but it worked well with the label's recent summery narrative strand. Fast forward to Parodia Flare, Chris Ward's debut album, and he's turned from bedroom synth enthusiast to one-man-band. For better or for worse, Parodia Flare sounds like the work of a real human and Ward's own androgynous but soothing (and heavily effects-laced) vocals are all over the record instead of the mangled murmurs that coated the previous EP. Normally—at least for me—this kind of move into indie rock territory by otherwise "electronic" artists is troublesome if not just for the coat of vanilla it tends to introduce. But for all that, Parodia Flare still feels swampy and—of course—electronic enough to be on Mu. After all, it's still hard to sound like a proper band when every instrument leaves behind cloudy vapour trails in the thick humidity. Like its colourful blur of a cover might suggest, Parodia Flare is visual music to the utmost, relying on pseudo-synaesthetic triggers and reactions to give its traditional songcraft an arty weight and its formless experiments some spontaneity and nuance. Ward doesn't just rely on elephantine swathes of sound. (There might be shoegaze touches but it never smears too much.) The difference from previous material is most pronounced in the rhythms, often driven by choppy drum kits that wade through heat-induced smog. Though he accents the rhythms with occasional drum fills, the rudimentary rigour lends it a motorik feel that brings it sometimes uncomfortably close to Deerhunter. In fact, everything right down to Ward's apathetic vocal cadence is a dead-ringer for the Atlanta psych rock band, an apparent influence that he can't always shake off on Flare....full text |
| Factmag |
| Swirling, hazy, woozy: that standard roll call of adjectives associated with the blurrier corners of the modern musical spectrum still seems almost impossible to avoid. That was especially the case in 2010, with the emergence of that clumsily-termed lo-fi phenomenon chillwave, and a time when one could scarcely read a review of anything without them surfacing somewhere along the way. Among your Neon Indians, Washed Outs and Memory Tapes came a British equivalent; set apart from the more “indie”-centered tendencies of their American forebears, artists like Chris ‘Tropics’ Ward seemed less concerned with the formation of a gimmicky aesthetic, instead offering a more clear-cut take on sun-bleached nostalgia songs. Soft Vision, Ward’s 2010 debut EP for Planet Mu, wasn’t wholly stunning but represented a firmer than usual highlight in the canon’s particularly wispy output. Sonically it seems little has changed in Ward’s approach, as his full album, Parodia Flare, shares the same vaporous strains as employed in his initial material. Ward has doubtless progressed in his arrangements, and Parodia Flare sounds like the efforts of an entire band compared to the bedroom producer tropes that speckled his initial offerings. Offering more fleshed-out drums, stray guitars and melodies more advanced than the usual reverb-soaked synthesizer lines, the album should be celebrated for its nuances, complexities and attention to detail; the subtle clack chimes during ‘On The Move’ and the interweaving of guitar and keys through ‘Playgrounds’ carry the hallmarks of a producer successfully fleshing out the ideas in his head. The problem here however, is that Parodia Flare carries so many ideas, and so many slight variations of woozy techniques, that it becomes near impossible to find any structure beneath them. Parodia Flare is as lost in daydreams as its stoned, student psych-artwork implies. Admittedly it manages to avoid the nagging sense of artistic posturing that plagues similar American artists, but still only manages to drift, often shapeless in a sea of breathy vocals and airy pads; the driving rhythms that made moments like Soft Vision‘s title track memorable seem lacking, surfacing only momentarily on ‘Telessar’ before the album slips back into the ether. With little demonstration of this previously-established firmness of touch, Parodia Flare often fails to engage, moments of interest intermittently emerging from the fog before disappearing back into an album that too often opts for vague evocation over genuine direction....full text |
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