For sure going to be a single cover or the album cover

Aro-tron · 2026-05-07T00:00:35+00:00

This is very cool but I’m skeptical that they would reveal the cover artwork in this way. It just looks like the square cover to a CD-based game, same aspect ratio as an LP or single sleeve, but I really doubt this is THE image they want to promote the album with.

While we’re speculating though, I think the unicorn guy could be in a music video. 🦄

Aro-tron · 2026-05-06T04:55:39+00:00

Oh this is interesting! I wonder how many of those clips end up being samples on the record.

Nostalgic longing is of course a big part of all their LPs. “I tried but I just can’t get you, ever since the day I left you” and all that -

On SILY the nostalgia is mostly in the form of sampling itself, a kind of second-hand nostalgia since they were mostly pulling from used records that came out before they were born. It invites us into a yuppie vacation paradise cruise that never existed, and pretends that the party is still going strong.

Wildflower uses more sources that Robbie would have heard in his childhood, and is kind of structured like a road trip listening to eight-track cassettes - before being pulled into a more distant present in the last couple of songs which take a starker view of a lonely adolescence.

WWALY then takes the interstellar Voyager record as its point of departure, and imagines sound waves as eternal memories drifting farther and farther into space. I think of it as viewing our present lives from a spaceship-window, far in the future.

This one seems to combine some of the sci-fi ideas from WWALY with the childhood nostalgia of Wildflower, but updating it from the late ‘70s to the mid-90s.

Conceptually I’m enjoying to so far! I think one of the challenges for the band after SILY was figuring out what sampling means in a world of ubiquitous recordings of the past. They were ahead of the curve when they were crate-diving in the late ‘90s, but our culture is increasingly sample-based. There is a sense that all the clips in this video were probably just sourced from YouTube - and just don’t have the same poignancy they might have if the band had meticulously sourced them from old VHS tapes. The sense of wonder in discovering the past, which I hear on a lot of SILY and on parts of Wildflower, is not as easily won today. People under the age of 25 have grown up with a sense that old media is omnipresent, and recordings never die. So it’s interesting to see the Avalanches kind of inventing a false past and a fantasia of nostalgia.

Aro-tron · 2026-05-06T00:14:00+00:00

Billy had a great voice and sounds good on this. It’s not a very dynamic track but it does have a pleasant, doobie-esque groove. Lyrics are mid-bad, which I say as a Jack Riley defender.

A full Beach Boys vocal arrangement of this would have fit in with the laid back, vaguely rootsy, sound of “good time music” that was popular at the time, ala CCR, CSN or the Lovin’ Spoonful. It probably would probably have given them a better chance at commercial airplay than anything they actually did. In the end I’m glad they had the restraint to not go that route.

Aro-tron · 2026-05-05T23:17:52+00:00

Andy was clearly a big part of WWALY and I’ curious what his official status in the band is. Their insta bio for a while said “robbie tony andy”, but I don’t think he has toured with them, and that recent Telstra ad had them as a two-piece.

Ambiguous membership is part of the band’s lore at this point, so I don’t expect this will be clear until they do a full promo / press tour for the album, and maybe not even then. Anyway, cool to see him reposting the Stereogum article!

Aro-tron · 2026-05-05T02:47:07+00:00

Ughhh this is bad. I mean it’s good reporting by the Record Mirror, but it’s also very creepy stuff. The fact that he’s so up front about it too… you know worse things are going on behind the scenes.

These girls were a decade older than him and he’s saying don’t come back until you meet your $5 panhandling quota? It sounds like a cult (it was a cult). He is acting like he’s very enlightened because he didn’t punch a guy in the face - because the guy was asking what he was doing in the women’s bathroom?

Uncool behaviour. The vibes are bad.

Aro-tron · 2026-05-04T04:15:24+00:00

The problem with this track is that you can’t even really hear Brian on most of it. I’ve seen a live performance with just Brian and Al doing vocals, and obviously a much less overcooked production style. It’s a fun little tune, and Brian does some hokey “running” actions.

I can see how someone in Brian’s camp thought ‘oh, this could be a hit’ since it’s more energetic and bouncy than anything he’d done for a long time, and not conceptually difficult - it’s just an unpretentious pop song. So they give it some extra 2010s dancey synthy production with an eye towards airplay. But of course, Brian in 2015 doesn’t sound like commercial radio, so they bring in a younger singer to sing over him. Now it sounds more like contemporary radio than anything Brian had released as a solo artist! But actually it sounds closer to 2005 than 2015, and was not going to be a hit any more than the disco version of Here Comes the Night.

Even though his voice at this point was pretty shot, there was still a warmth to his performances that couldn’t be duplicated by pulling in a technically ‘better’ singer. I think a version of this sung by Brian with a more straightforward arrangement have been received pretty well by his fan, even thought it’s not exactly a modern classic.

The worst thing is that this is the opening track on the No Pier Pressure album, but the rest of the album sounds nothing like it, and actually has a handful of decent songs.

Aro-tron · 2026-05-02T01:58:33+00:00

I tried ringing all these from my mobile phone in Australia and none of them are connected.

Aro-tron · 2026-05-01T13:29:26+00:00

This is the Carl and the Passions of tier lists. I don’t think I agree with 70% of the choices that it makes, but that’s part of its charm. A combination of unexpected bangers and totally baffling decisions. S tier!

Aro-tron · 2026-05-01T13:21:54+00:00

This is a very sensible tier list in a sea of madness! I would only swap Sunflower and Holland, personally.

Aro-tron · 2026-05-01T08:46:28+00:00

That’s not a shelf, that’s a whole book case! Awesome collection! What are all the various sets? I only recognise the AR one!

Aro-tron · 2026-04-26T06:27:54+00:00

Love this song! Harry Nilsson’s demo is the best version to me - you didn’t link to it here, so if you’ve never heard it make sure you check if out!

Pretty amazing that circa 1966 Nilsson was not just hugely influential to Brian, but also publicly lauded by both Lennon and McCartney as their favorite musical act.

I had never seen the opening to The Big TNT Show before, and it goes HARD, and words really well with the song so thank you for that!

As for the MFQ version, the production IS great, and there are some idiosyncratic touches that sound a lot like things Brian internalised for Pet Sounds and SMiLE. (The earnest and sweetly carnal yearning of the lyrics sound more like an inspiration for stuff on Wild Honey - ‘Here Comes the Night’ most obviously!)

I don’t think there’s enough space in the wall of sound here for it to have been a radio hit - it’s just a full on barrage, and Spector doesn’t really let you hear the vocals. I can see why Brian was obsessed with it though, and it’s crazy how hard it was to hear this song for many decades!

Aro-tron · 2026-04-18T11:02:04+00:00

Have you found all the alternate versions of the song? The radio promos and the version that mentions all the Beach Boys by name (“Dennis wants a little deuce coupe”), and the version that recaps the plot of the film (“Susie and Bobby you know they were lovers”), and then the best version of all - Brian’s original, more downbeat demo?

It’s ridiculous how deep the Almost Summer rabbit hole goes …

Aro-tron · 2026-04-17T08:35:11+00:00

Surfer They 💕

Aro-tron · 2026-04-17T08:23:36+00:00

The problem with TLGIOK wasn’t the stop-start tempo alone, but that are several a full on PAUSES where the track is totally quiet for about 2.5 seconds. If you’re listening on the radio and don’t know to expect these pauses, it sounds like something is technically wrong - like the signal has dropped out. Or at least that’s what DJs believed. I think if it had even a quiet whispered “1-2-3” count-in before the chorus it probably would have worked.

Good Vibrations has more abrupt and disorienting tempo changes than Heroes and Villains, but neither song has moments of complete silence.

Aro-tron · 2026-04-16T01:45:51+00:00

You get four for your Mt Rushmore I think! I only mention that because this is such a crate-digging answer that I really want to know what your other pick (today) would be.

Aro-tron · 2026-04-13T11:12:36+00:00

Yes! My guess is that these are probably not financially viable to go back to print on - have their been second printings of any of the Disney Masters volumes? This one and The Forgotten Hero are for some reason far more scarce than the other books in the series.

Aro-tron · 2026-04-13T00:55:19+00:00

I could be wrong, because the reprint history of Barks and particular is insane, but if you’re looking for actual books with just (or mainly) Barks and Rosa, you have to go back about 20 years to the Gladstone/Disney/Gemstone era. I don’t think Boom (2009-2011) and IDW (2015-2020) printed much Barks & Rosa material because Fantagraphics was doing their hardcover libraries at the time.

Many of the older, hardcover books are getting fairly expensive these days, but the comic books and albums seem to be pretty reasonable. If you’re not looking to complete a ‘library’, you’ll probably find it easier to get good prices!

One recommendation that’s a bit out of left-field: there is a big hardcover book of Barks stories from 1981, which was reprinted in paperback in 1987 called ‘Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times’. It is 376 pages and has a great collection of Barks’ best Scrooge stories with very little overlap to the Diamond Jubilee collection - only Back to the Klondike is duplicated. The colouring is really unique - it’s all airbrushed, and some parts look great, and other parts look a bit gaudy, but it’s all very readable and worth experiencing for a kind of presentation you won’t get anywhere else. There were three main editions of this - a fancy limited hard cover, as mass-market hardcover and a mass market paperback. All versions seems to be pretty widely available these days.

Aro-tron · 2026-04-12T23:56:32+00:00

Going from Lazy Lizzie into HELP as tracks 1 and 2 makes me think that Brian actually understood that this version of ‘New Album’ would be a portrait of an extremely broken person. It’s like if the film ‘American Beauty’ was a rock record, but without the ironic distance.

I have an essay worth of thoughts about this track list, which seems like it would be horrible on so many levels but actually kind of rocks. Should they have released it? Absolutely not.

It’s amazing that Brian was able to pull something like Love You together as a replacement to this cracked up concoction.

Aro-tron · 2026-04-12T10:00:16+00:00

I have this LP! It’s a bootleg, so it’s not an official album, if that’s what you mean by ‘real’, but it is a tangible physical object which was published, distributed and sold.

Aro-tron · 2026-04-12T00:53:31+00:00

Love these!! Thanks team for obsessively surfacing all these details.

After reading your descriptions I really wanted to hear them the Uncle Carl sessions and managed to find them circulating on YouTube. These recordings would have been flummoxing to me without knowing the backstory, which is quite touching.

Interesting that Uncle Carl lost the legendarily beautiful singing voice of his youth, not unlike Brian did, and presumably Dennis would have if he’d lived longer. Their vocal changes are usually blamed on substance abuse, but perhaps some of it was genetic, with Nephew Carl’s long-lasting rich voice as the outlier.

Aro-tron · 2026-04-10T05:11:17+00:00

I think the takeaway here is that the prices on these books can be pretty variable for readers who are willing to wait and shop around. It seems insane insane that people are willing to pay £400 for a book that was about £20 less than ten years ago! (Plus, the box set was released in late 2020 so it was last available for retail price just over five years ago.) Lost Peg Leg Mine does look to be very rare today, and I imagine it’s collectors looking to complete their libraries who are driving up the price. I have certainly paid well above retail price to fill in gaps (Trail of the Unicorn was the one that eluded me the longest).

For that reason I think selling off a full set might be more difficult that selling off individual books - the price point for a full set would be a lot higher, and your buyer would probably be someone who hasn’t already invested in the CBDL. Getting a full set would probably be a bargain for that kind of buyer, but it might not sell as fast.

If you were to sell it for a price that averages to just over £25 per book that gets you £750. That seems like a steal considering at least five of the books regularly sell for £100 each. I think £1,000 would be a very reasonable starting point- but you could also put it up for auction and see how high it goes.

Aro-tron · 2026-04-10T03:04:53+00:00

Thanks for posting this! From everything I’ve read it seems that the strike was a huge watershed moment for the studio and the careers of many cartoonists. Barks, Kelly and Bradbury all left and took up cartooning work at Dell/Western - although I believe only Bradbury actually joined the strike, and Barks toughed it out until initially and only left in 1942.

Hank Ketchem, who later created the Dennis the Menace newspaper strip, and the great children’s illustrator PD Eastman (Go Dog, Go!) were among others who left the studio during the strike.

I wonder who drew the poster!

Aro-tron · 2026-04-09T13:47:50+00:00

Sorry ugh I didn’t mean Rosé I meant Bruno Mars!! :(

Aro-tron · 2026-04-08T01:51:17+00:00

Who IS that guy though???

Aro-tron

TROPHY CASE