I think the best bands are those who create music that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. It isn’t always enough to get a group of individually talented musicians together in a room and just see what comes out, unedited and uncensored. The risk you sometimes run when your musical heroes indulge in solo albums and side projects is that you might end up with a watered down version of the original. The potential danger is even greater with so-called supergroups, where the expectations are so high, but the magic may or may not be there. Comprised of members of Rx Bandits, Circa Survive, Chiodos, Good Old War, Finch, and The Autumns, The Sound Of Animals Fighting take a page from The Traveling Wilburys handbook, humbly adopting anonymous aliases The Nightingale, The Walrus, The Lynx, and The Skunk.

The band find themselves in an interesting position as they release their third album, The Ocean And The Sun. They set the bar high with 2005’s Tiger And The Duke, a concept album about a mutiny aboard a ship whose cargo are animals that constantly howl and fight below deck. The following year they released the highly experimental Lover, The Lord Has Left Us, which relied more on electronic instrumentation, and also featured a wide array of guest musicians. This time around the sound is closer to that of their debut, focusing more on organic compositions, with occasional distorted percussion, noise interludes, and electronically tweaked children’s voices to mix it up a bit.

Stylistically, the music covers the extremes of early Mars Volta prog-punk, late 90s math rock, and classic symphonic prog, with bits of world music and sleepy psychedelia thrown in for good measure. The sound shifts and sways all over the map from song to song, and it’s nearly impossible to describe in terms of genre, but it almost sounds like the music I *wish* Coheed And Cambria had decided to make after their second album. Moments like the final three minutes of the fantastic closer “On The Occasion Of Wet Snow” are absolutely epic, while the technical complexity of the aggressive odd-time riffs found in “The Heraldic Beak Of The Manufacturer’s Medallion” are just about as good as it gets for a music nerd like me.

Of course, as with any such ambitious musical offering, there are moments where it inevitably falls somewhat flat. Producer/project mastermind Rich Balling (The Nightingale) probably should have left more of the lead vocal duties to Anthony Green (The Skunk), whose soaring delivery is instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever heard a Circa Surivive track. The moment he takes over for the chorus of “I, The Swan,” his powerful voice renders the first two minutes of the song almost forgettable. On another note, an ambient interlude or two could have been cut in favor of making the album a little more concise. Likewise, editing a couple minutes out of the sprawling “Uzbekistan” could have resulted in better pacing in the somewhat meandering second half of the album.

In the end, for all its hits and misses, The Ocean And The Sun is without a doubt a grand musical statement and a notable achievement, worthy of praise from fans of any of its members’ full-time bands. Taken at face value, while you might end up skipping over a track or two, it is still a solid album that deserves a place in the collection of any fan of complex and challenging music. Perhaps the biggest downside is that they have no intention of playing live shows to promote the album, due to the members’ various commitments to their individual bands. But even if their busy schedules do not allow them to write another chapter in the history of The Sound Of Animals Fighting, at least we have this collection of songs as an artifact of how great experimental rock can be.