Album Of The Day: The Cymbal Crashing Clouds by Ben Shive

Album Art of Ben Shive's The Cymbal Crashing Clouds album - An illustration of a city of some sort. The sky is pink for some reason, and on the left is a large tree with no leaves. Underneath the tree is a yellow owl with a white, human face that is as tall as the multi-story buildings the own is standing next to. Across the are to the right of the owl is four buildings, all pained white with not too many windows, and all of which have red roofs but different colored doors. In front of them, stretching across the bottom, is a road which has 6 cars of various colors on it. In front of the tree is a wall with a door in it and a person walking through. Behind the buildings on the right is a green, steep hill and there are four green churches on the hillside. Around the edge of the hill comes a train on a track that stretches out into the sky above the buildings and the track is falling apart. The train is red and the steam from the locomotive is the clouds, where the album title is printed in a script. To the left of that, in the pink sky, is the artist's name in yellow.

Released 15 years ago today, this is the second album by musician and producer Ben Shive. Mr. Shive has been known to me as a producer and multi-instrumentalist, working with many types of artists, mostly Christian pop/rock artists. I'm not sure why, but I've never taken the time to check out his two independent solo albums until today. It's definitely on the more experimental end of rock/pop music, but it's really layered, interesting music. Some of it could almost be mistaken for an unreleased later-years Beach Boys track that you had not heard before. I've heard lots of the artists he's worked with rave about his music, and I'm very glad I finally gave it a spin on this album's 15th anniversary. I'll have to give it a few more listens and devote more time to better digesting this album in the coming weeks.

Release Year: 2011
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Categories: 
Album Of The Day
Music

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