Dark Side Of The Moon
essential recordingDark Side of the Moon, originally released in 1973, is one of those albums that is discovered anew by each generation of rock listeners. This complex, often psychedelic music works very well because Pink Floyd doesn’t rush anything; the songs are mainly slow to mid-tempo, with attention paid throughout to musical texture and mood. The sound effects on songs like “On the Run,” “Time” and especially “Money” (with sampled sounds of clinking coins and cash registers tu [Read More...]
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Studies have been conducted on the success of Pink Floyd’s classic, best-of-the-best “Dark Side of the Moon.” Some results are as follows:
*One in every 20 people under the age of 50 in the United States owns a copy of this album *Dark Side remained on Billboard’s 200 album chart for an amazing 15 years straight and then for another two when it was remastered back in 1994 *It is currently the most successful album ever with upwards of 40 million copies sold world-wide
Now the question… WHY? Why should one album by a band back in 1973 have such outstanding achievments and admiration even today? Perhaps because of the time period. Look at other albums released the same year by bands like Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Rush, and the Doobie Brothers among several others. This was the year of rock perfection. Or maybe it was because of the rave for concept albums. Or the simple, yet unforgettable album cover.
More likely it was the band’s chemistry and ability to make jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring, thought-provoking music. This is Pink Floyd at its collective finest, with everyone contributing. Unlike the band in 6 years, Waters did NOT do everything. Gilmoure took a huge chunk of the music-writing, laying down the chord progressions on “Breathe,” “Time,” and “Any Colour You Like;” the singing on the album’s best songs, Water’s conceeding to David’s far superior voice; and pumping out what would later be hailed as some of rock’s most influential lead-guitar riffs on “Money” and “Brain Damage.” Wright got in on much of the writing as well with his keyboard contributions on “Breathe,” the symphonic “Great Gig in the Sky,” “Us and Them,” and the amazing keybpard licks and effects on “Colour.” Mason, who rarely contributed, put in his efforts on “Speak to Me,” “Time,” and the Waters-less “Colour.” Finally, Roger Waters put down most of the album’s music, laid down all the bass-lines as usual, thought up the album’s concept, and wrote all the lyrics. If that’s not enough, he made himself heard on “Brain Damage,” “Eclipse,” and the chorus of “Time.” Anyway you put it, THIS is the true Pink Floyd; all contributing, all acknowledged.
The band’s titanic success was continued on later albums like 1975’s “Wish You Were Here,” 1977’s “Animals,” and 1979’s “The Wall,” although by that time the band had begun to fall apart from Waters’ power obsession. By 1983, the band had slipped to a Water’s-solo-project version of itself, with “The Final Cut,” and finally a break-up. But never would the band see the success or experience the musical genious of “Dark Side of the Moon.” So pop this in, take another listen, and remember- even if you don’t believe the hype- after this album, music would never be the same….
The problem with some albums (most of The Beatles’ catalogue, Zeppelin, Radiohead, etc) is so much has been written about them there’s not a lot new to say. For DARK SIDE OF THE MOON I figured I’d examine the record more in the context of their catalogue overall, as this is not very often examined in Amazon reviws.
As I’ve said in other reviews, Pink Floyd has always been a weird band. There’s a reason why they’re considered the ultimate space-rock band. And while there are other albums in their catalogue that are even spacier and more strange than the perennial favorite DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (ATOM HEART MOTHER and PIPER AT THE GATES OF DOWN, to name but two), it is here, on this album, that the band trimmed back their wild experiments to manageable songs. And once the general public figured out what Pink Floyd was capable of, they bought the record in droves.
Pink Floyd has a sizeable catalogue that dates before DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. While the Pink Floyd Faithful know these albums, a lot of fans don’t know these records, and if they go looking for another DARK SIDE, they are often puzzled at the music they do find. There’s a reason for that.
Pre-1973, Pink Floyd was very much on the outer edges of rock music. Like The Grateful Dead, they played by their own rules, and invented and subverted their own musical forms into something druggy, ethereal, and far beyond the scope of any normal popsong. Listening to early Pink Floyd records is like an audio-acid trip, and it’s surprising that not only did they get to release such experimental music, with no real chance of getting radioplay or singles, but they got to release so many albums of it. With today’s market and expectations and pro-tools mentality of the quest for the perfect popsong that will be the next big hit, the early PF records would never have been released.
All this changed in 1972, when Pink Floyd released their criminally underrated soundtrack OBSCURED BY CLOUDS. The true precursor to DARK SIDE, OBSCURED was recorded just as the initial sessions for DARK SIDE began. Moving away from the side-long suites and long winding instrumentals, OBSCURED features 10 songs, only four of which are instrumentals, with the other six songs being very akin to the DARK SIDE songs. It is with OBSCURED that Pink Floyd began writing music that would be much more accessible to the general record-buying public.
Pink Floyd continued in the direction they began with OBSCURED BY CLOUDS. Streamlining their music, Pink Floyd forwent the rather bizarre experiments that made up the bulk of their previous work. But don’t think they sold out. Everything in DARK SIDE has precedent in their previous work.
While there’s nothing that truly sounded like DARK SIDE in 1973, the music sounds very much like a culmination of all their previous experimentation (not counting Barret’s PIPER) dating from 1968 to 1972. But rather than let their audio love of sound effects get away with them (”Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast”), or draw their often fascinating instrumental music to gargantuan proportions (”Echoes”, “Atom Heart Mother”) that only prog fans will wade through, the band took the elements of their overall sound, streamlined it, and used much more accessible songwriting, but still being true to their artistic vision.
And it is a vision and a sound that a lot of people love. DARK SIDE epitomizes what the band was capable of. Filled with sound effects, spacey music, turbocharged [turbocharted] instrumentals, DARK SIDE takes elements from all of the band’s previous albums and utilizes them here. A lot of the sound effect work is rather famous, especially the interview snippits that engineer Alan Parsons and the band sprinkled throughout the album. Paul McCartney was interviewed, but seasoned by years of media coverage, the band felt his answers were too guarded and not as off-the-cuff as they wanted. The “I’m drunk” line was by Henry McCullough. There’s also a barely audible orchestral version of The Beatles “Ticket To Ride” that can be briefly heard at the end of “Eclipse”.
Pink Floyd always had the potential to be not only great musicians and rock artists but also commercially. But let’s not kid ourselves. Without DARK SIDE, they would not be the commercial juggernauts that they have become today. Had they broke up with OBSCURED, today Pink Floyd would be one of those cult bands that a lot of people haven’t heard of, but that those who do know them find them very interesting.
And that is why DARK SIDE is their definitive album, and one of the biggest selling albums ever. It is here on DARK SIDE that Pink Floyd went from being beyond a cult band with some rather esoteric, rather impenetrable music, to being a very successful band with the same sonic identity, but more streamlined and much more accessible to the general pubic.
(As far s the whole Dark Side of the Rainbow phenomena goes, where Wizard of Oz and the album syncs, apparently it is unintentional, or so the band claims. Pretty bizaare how well they sync if indeed it is unintentional).
5.0 out of 5 stars
Duh!
It’s a classic for a reason. What Sgt. Pepper did for pop music, Dark Side of the Moon does for rock. It’s conceptual, brilliant and timeless.
Once in a while, a rock band or other musical entity puts out an album that, quite simply, changes the face of music history. And yet, Pink Floyd was a rather unlikely group of musical innovators: An excellent singer/guitarist(David Gilmour) who was, until the release of this album, best known merely as “Syd Barrett’s replacement,” (Barrett, still regarded by many fans as the band’s true musical genius, had recently taken leave of his senses and was apparently holed up somewhere watching the floor relate to the walls); a fine bassist/writer/singer/perfectionist (Roger Waters) still tortured by his fatherless upbringing; a low-key keyboardist and rather good singer and writer (Rick Wright) who stayed in the background as much as possible; and finally, a rather thoughtful percussionist and sound-effects wizard (Nick Mason), whose most lasting claim to fame would be as the man who vocalized the chilling spoken word threat in the band’s classic “One Of These Days”. An unlikely band of innovators, to be sure. And yet, Pink Floyd was properly positioned in the right place at the right time with the right sound. The year was 1973, the musical revolution started in the sixties was still in full swing, FM radio was in it’s infancy (Recently taken over by hippie-types who longed for hours and hours of nice, spacy, commercial-free programming). In a word, rock music was the touchstone of our generation, just as television had been the touchstone of our parent’s generation, and computers would be to our childen’s generation. Those of us in high school or college spent hours every night and weekend, gathered around the stereo in someone’s apartment or room, getting high, drunk, or just daydreaming, pondering such important questions as “What makes Teflon stick to the pan?” (Thank you, Gallagher!) In many of these listening spaces, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon was the album of choice, sometimes listened to over and over again. The mad mutterings of “Speak to Me,” the celestial swirl of “Breathe”, the jet-propulsive paranoia of “On the Run,” and “Time,” a favorite subject of young questers everywhere (along with madness, death, and pizza), “The Great Gig in the Sky” (with Claire Torry’s incredible vocal-cries of universal anguish, “Money”, first-rate blues rock, “Us and Them”, hypnotic yet thought-provoking, “Any Colour You Like,” sheer beauty, “Brain Damage”, the madman inside all of us, and “Eclipse,” the perfect thematic coda. All received by us, the grateful listeners, in our various states of consciousness (altered or otherwise), and then purchased, time and again, from music stores. Dark Side of the Moon was the ONE ALBUM that every rock fan (and many wouldn’t otherwise be caught dead listening to rock music) had to own. Why??? After thirty years, I can offer only a tentative answer: Most people cannot stand to ruminate for long about ourselves and our place in the universe, yet every human being on the face of this earth will at sometime wonder: Why are we here??? The Pink Floyd, through this classic masterwork, holds no answers for us, yet it is as if they are offering to accompany us as we journey toward self-discovery, making the transition easier, soothing the pain, quieting the hurt even as they force us to see inside ourselves. Thanks, guys, from all of your fellow voyagers. I think I can safely speak for many when I say the road to self-awareness would have been much bumpier if I had not traveled it in your celestial vehicle. I say once, and I say again, SHINE ON, YOU CRAZY DIAMONDS and rock on, even unto the darkest part of the dark side of the moon.
1.0 out of 5 stars
there bessed
Heyho gang of people gathring hear, let’s tell you this is cleaverly there best I
Ops I fregot mine neighm :
Ruffus Dewilde
1.0 out of 5 stars
way too much ego, way too little experiment
This here album must surely be the kind of stuff that meat pigs dig because it is highly atrocious. I would even say this disc is a DOWNRIGHT INSULT on the name pink floid…
1.0 out of 5 stars
way too much ego, way too little experiment
This here album must surely be the kind of stuff that meat pigs dig because it is highly atrocious. I would even say this disc is a DOWNRIGHT INSULT on the name pink floid…
1.0 out of 5 stars
way too much ego, way too little experiment
This here album must surely be the kind of stuff that meat pigs dig because it is highly atrocious. I would even say this disc is a DOWNRIGHT INSULT on the name pink floid…
1.0 out of 5 stars
way too much ego, way too little experiment
This here album must surely be the kind of stuff that meat pigs dig because it is highly atrocious. I would even say this disc is a DOWNRIGHT INSULT on the name pink floid…
5.0 out of 5 stars
Floyd’s best
This ambient, mysterious album sounds just as fresh as it did in 1973. Waters’ lyrics are deep and meaningful, and Gilmour’s solos are jaw-dropping.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best
Not only is this Pink Floyd’s best album, but it is one of the greatest albums put out by any band, ever!
2.0 out of 5 stars
triple 8 butt naked
Hear’s my add vice: play the great kick in disguise whilst your butt naked.
Butt naked is what you should be.
Butt naked!
Beno
2.0 out of 5 stars
triple 8 butt naked
Hear’s my add vice: play the great kick in disguise whilst your butt naked.
Butt naked is what you should be.
Butt naked!
Beno