I registered on this board just so I could reply to this thread.
I have been a big fan of both Ariel Pink and the Beach Boys for years so I was very happy to see this thread on here.
I have seen both Ariel Pink and Brian Wilson perform live. I listen to their music on a regular basis, especially lately. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, they provided the soundtrack of me driving between taco shops and cups of coffee.
There are some major generational, stylistic, and conceptual differences between these artists, but I make a direct connection between the two and like them for a lot of the same reasons.
There is a direct lineage of a certain type of California creative rock-n-roll songwriting musician that Starts with Brian Wilson and goes through people like Beck and bands like Pavement, but more specifically to what Jason Lytle was trying to do with Grandaddy and what Ariel Pink has been doing more recently.
Ariel Pink is more shocking pop-culture focused, and overtly borrows sounds and musical passages from the works of others. He gets compared to Frank Zappa for his humor and wacky songs. In his early lo-fi bedroom recording days, there wasn't much of a comparison between him and Brian Wilson. However, he has evolved. He's been doing this for 20 years and a few albums ago, when he made the leap from cassette four-track to studio recordings, his production skyrocketed.
There is more to Ariel Pink than gets conveyed by the pitchfork articles that focus on his controversial twitter posts mocking madonna. He's a pop savant with an amazing ear for melody and arrangement. His work continues to get richer with each release. It's rare for someone in the indie rock world to keep putting out such vital music without leaning on their own cliches.
I was a huge fan of Grandaddy since before they ever put out an album. Jason Lytle fancied himself a Jeff Lynne/Brian Wilson type creator of studio albums. He tried his best with The Sophtware Slump, but ran out of steam. Since then, he's unfortunately recycled the same harmonies, stock chord changes, and synth sound effects.
Luckily, down in LA, some obsessive force has driven a trashy art dude with a very different image to continue on this tradition with unyielding focus and drive.
If you can look past the schtick, his instinct for composition, arrangement, and melody shows a level of brilliance that very few people in the modern rock-n-roll world can touch. Ariel Pink has a huge pop music vocabulary at his command and somehow uses it in ways that are always distinctly his own, no matter who he is stealing from.
Picture Me Gone off PomPom has a distinctly later Brian Wilson vocal melody.
My favorite Ariel Pink Beach Boys reference is the ultra lo-fi absurd track Schnitzel Boogie off Mature Themes. The long outro which hauntingly repeats "schnitzel!" over and over bothered a friend of mine for being obnoxious, but I heard it as a direct nod to the beach boys. He just managed to absurdly squeeze it in there in a most unexpected way that would obviously not appeal to a traditional/conventional beach boys fan. It's like Brian Wilson's never ending Shortnin' Bread. He lets the unhinged madness have it's own moment.
To paraphrase something a good friend of mine recently said, Brian Wilson and Ariel Pink are both brilliant, emotionally unstable, introverted California guys who spend a lot of time in the recording studio to make really great albums.
What they have in common with me is that I never get tired of listening to their albums. They put me in a good mood. They are dreamers and they share the ability to transmit a sense of wonder in the musical universe they create in their songs and on their albums.
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