Ben Shive’s The Cymbal Crashing Clouds album is amazing on roughly thirty-seven different levels, and this book raises it to an even forty. It’s a companion to the album—but what the heck does that mean? It means eighty pages of great stuff like poetry, behind-the-music-style essays, and incredible Shel-Silverstein-meets-Pink-Floyd artwork by wunderkind Benji Anderson. Two entire songs from the album are given what can only be described as “the graphic novel treatment” with full spreads of artwork illustrating the lyrics as only Benji can. The bottom line is that it’s a hard book to describe because we’ve never seen anything quite like it—and that, of course, is why we at Rabbit Room Press love it.
Printed in hardcover and guaranteed to make you wonder “Who or what is that owl-boy?”
