Soundtracks, Mostly Off Topic

Hit more wind yesterday from Medicine Hat, AB to Regina, SK, this time coupled with rain, too. After a few hours of it, I decided to stop in Swift Current to warm up, get some coffee and check the email.
Normally employing no shortage of words, Jason Baker'd emailed me saying only, "I know you're on the road and shit, but do you have the new Brian Wilson?" I'd read a few months back that the man who 40 years ago was writing teenage symphonies to God had a new record in the works (his first album of truly new material since he infamously dropped off the grid while working on his masterpiece, Smile), but I didn't know that it'd either been released or leaked yet. Turns out the latter is the case, so I quickly called up my local file sharing bonanza. Five minutes later it was loaded onto my GPS unit's music player, and I was somewhat oddly going rippity rippity through pouring rain in the plains of Saskatchewan listening to Brian Wilson's paean to Los Angeles, That Lucky Old Sun; a stronger dissimilarity between aural and physical environments I can hardly imagine.
Perhaps that experiential disconnect can be blamed, but Sun didn't affect me nearly so strongly as the rest of the Brian Wilson/Beach Boys catalog; Smile or Pet Sounds it ain't. There are some truly cringe-worthy moments, but also heart rending ones: on Sun we hear for the first time Brian referencing in song his own meltdown at age 25.
The only other record I'd previously transferred to the GPS was the Panda Bear album Person Pitch, and this record began playing just as Sun faded out. Utilizing a wholly different set of musical tools, Panda's Noah Lennox is nevertheless perhaps the 21st century's closest analog to BW. A closet musical perfectionist, prematurely world-weary, Lennox creates layered masterpieces of looped, nuanced samples, overlaid with reverb-drenched vocal harmonies that remind as nothing so much as the Beach Boys recorded in a silo (underwater?).
Heading toward Winnipeg today; probably won't arrive till tomorrow, and so will camp along the way. More when time and internet access allows.