• Mind-bending progsters capture the raw vastness of nature.

The third in a series of visionary, concept-driven, genre-bending collaborations, The Ocean and the Sun is a cacophonic prog-rock invention of mammoth proportions. Channeling what they describe as “the raw vastness of nature,” the members of The Sounds of Animals Fighting (the Lynx, the Skunk, the Walrus and the Nightingale) deconstruct modern music in order to harness its most fundamental elements. A daunting album to navigate, The Ocean and the Sun’s poignantly somnambulant title track wanders into the deep, dark woods and becomes hopelessly mired in the organic corpulence of the succeeding sludge-core epic “I, the Swan.” Delighting in the interplay of light and shadow that is the touchstone of bands such as Black Mountain and The Mars Volta, The Sounds of Animals Fighting attacks each free-floating arrangement from multiple vantage points, laying into the would-be choruses with nightmarish ferocity. On “Lude” and “Cellophane,” free-floating Zeppelin-calibre vocals spew psychedelic slam poetry through layers of electronic ambient noise. When they retreat beneath the towering pillars of their unabashedly earnest heavy metal anthems, the groundbreaking quartet dredges up the hard stuff with mind-bending consequences.