The Cymbal Crashing Clouds

This, the second album from producer/songwriter/musician Ben Shive, will melt your mind. It’s a lush and literate train ride that carries you through a landscape peopled with prophets, piano teachers, Beatles, Beach Boys, prom punks, superheroes, little children, and dying friends; it’s an ode to the million points of light in the night sky and the holy threads that connect them to each other and to us and to the God that hung them.

Like his previous album, The Ill-Tempered Klavier, Shive shows us not just his musical talent, but his equally formidable lyrical ability, and though his influences are evident it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the world fashioning a collection of songs as artful, eccentric, and unabashedly spiritual in theme.