Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon: 30th Anniversary Edition
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Free Music Notes for The Dark Side of the Moon: 30th Anniversary Edition
Free Music Review: The best gets better
Hit: 5 Stars
I was on to these guys early - 1967 - The Piper at the Gates of Dawn - still have the rather well-played and scratchy LP. At that time no-one predicted that the group would become as huge as it did. Although the album was successful in the UK (#6) it went unnoticed in the US (#131). Ironic then that over thirty years after it was released Rolling Stone would have it as 347/500 all time! As the years passed Floyd remained a mainstay in the UK album charts while in the US none of the group's subsequent six LP's cracked Billboard's top 50. This changed in 1973 with the release of The Dark Side of the Moon. Like Hotel California, A Stairway to Heaven and Thriller, Dark Side is much-played (perhaps over-played) music that never wears out its welcome with me. The years come and go, yet I never tire of this album. On Amazon.com there are 1202 Pepper reviews and nearly 1500 for Dark Side! Sales for the cd still approach 10,000 a week. Combined Canadian sales for all formats are estimated at 2 million - in a country of 35 million. The record has just 38 minutes of music, proving once again that we don't need to fill every cd with to its maximum 80 minutes.
For me Pink Floyd rather lost their way after Piper. Subsequent LP's wandered rather aimlessly hither and hither, a decent song or piece of music followed by meandering/experimental sections or songs that to my ear were more a collection of sounds than they were music. Picking my way through More, Atom Heart Mother or Ummagumma to find the worthwhile tracks was just too much like hard work. Dark Side was therefore a revelation. The band suddenly matured and the result was a brilliantly consistent album with one great song followed by another. There isn't a remotely weak track to be found. My recollection is that Dark Side was a collection of accessible prog-space-acid-psychedelic rock songs far more commercial in nature than anything that the band had recorded theretofore. However, today, if I really listen closely and analyze the music I realize that the music on Dark Side isn't that far removed from the music that preceded it on the LP's that I don't particular care for. A cake is a combination of eggs, flour, milk and sugar, mixed and baked. An edible cake has the right combination of ingredients, mixed in the appropriate order and for the appropriate length of time so as to create a batter of the proper consistency. The cake mixture is then placed in the oven at the correct temperature for the appropriate period of time. Pink Floyd always had the ingredients. They simply didn't have the rest of the equation worked out. With Dark Side the band learned that focus and superlative production (engineer Alan Parsons) does make a huge difference. The sound affects, rather than being just unrelated noise, become integral parts of the song. The songs no longer meander, as if searching for a conclusion - five on the album are under 4 minutes in length. The lyrics are interesting. This record was and remains an exceptional, once in a lifetime achievement that still sounds as fresh as the day it was released. Dark Side has always sounded tremendous, from record through to cd. However I cannot begin to describe how spectacular the reproduction is on this hybrid SACD.
Free Music Review: A timeless classic which transcends "rock" - as it should be heard
Hit: 5 Stars
One fine day in March 1973, as a fresh-faced teen I bought my vinyl copy of DSOTM on its release-day from Virgin Records in Liverpool. I still have that vinyl album in its original first-day sleeve, lined up in order (in that anally-retentive way men often have with cataloguing their music collections) between my original vinyl first-day releases of "Obscured by Clouds" and "Wish You Were Here."
By the fifth or sixth bar of "The Great Gig in the Sky" on that fine March afternoon, I remember thinking: "This is different: Floyd have gone more commercial, more musical, accessible to the mainstream. This album will endure; I bet people will still be listening to it in 10 years' time" - i.e. I thought people might still be listening to DSOTM in the far, far future in 1983 when surely half of us would be actually living in geodetic domes on the dark side of The Moon. I heard the recording hundreds of times and saw it performed live by the band at the old Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, at Knebworth on a beautiful summer evening and at Earl's Court.
Now 37 years later, new generations are still discovering this timeless classic from the pre-internet, pre-PC prog-rock era. If you are one of the small percentage of the global population who have never heard this epic piece and you don't know what all the fuss is about then go buy, rent or borrow the album. If you can't find an original UK Harvest-label CD pressing from the late 1970s, listen to a SACD disk on a dedicated SACD player to experience the deep, rich, beautiful sound achieved by Alan Parsons' exemplary production. You'll soon understand why this music has outlasted just about everything else recorded in the 1970s, 80s and 90s (anyone remember "Punk" from the late 1970s? Anyone listening to it now? No). Listen to the album as a whole, from start to finish, and appreciate the way the tracks seamlessly flow from one to the next as they explore the pressures faced by any self-aware human living in modern society and the ever-present risk of it all driving you nuts.
In finding ever-newer generations of appreciative listeners, DSOTM has somehow transcended "rock" and become a kind of "classical music". It sounds fresher and more contemporary than most music from the 80s and 90s, which often now sounds dated. It's Pink Floyd at the high point of their long, chequered and mould-breaking career as cerebral, creative, experimental, intelligent originals, full of fine songwriting, beautiful melodies, subtlety of light and shade, major-to-minor key changes, inventive use of instrumentation and sound, rich complexity, lyrical and poetic writing, real-life speech samples (Roger Waters' idea, a quirky stroke of genius which works and adds to the album's unique character), and a couple of hit singles thrown in. It's the ultimate "concept album", a milestone of excellence; the musical signature of a generation, of its time and yet for all time, and you can listen to it forever.
In fact, if you don't have DSOTM in your collection then you're probably not serious about music. And this is the version to have.
Free Music Review: magnum opus
Hit: 5 Stars
Pink Floyd was a popular band from the sixties, but when "Dark Side of the Moon" came on the scene in 1974, it set the tone and quality for all albums to follow. The album was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at Abbey Road Studios and mixed by Alan Parsons (winner of a Grammy for this project). With multi-track recording, tape loops, special sound effects, a multitude of synthesizers and oblique philosophical quotes throughout, this was a high point rarely reached in rock/pop music history.
Band members Mason, Waters, Gimour and Wright create an album of mood, feeling, euphoria, confusion, fear and excitement. One of the unsung singers that blasted the blues into the album was female vocalist Clare Torry. Her emotive blasts carry through several songs. "Speak To Me" starts with a heartbeat and slowly slips into "Breathe", a breezy, bluesy number with hooks, emotion and lyrics that fascinate. No one can forget, "On The Run" with its special effects of someone running, airport announcements, generally strange noises and confusion until it ends with an atomic explosion.
It should be noted that in the early severnties, many bands were experimenting with quadraphenia, that is close to surround sound only without the center front speaker. The latest edition has been remastered in 5.1 surround sound that boggles the mind. Animals respons to it as if it was a living thing moving about the room. The best and most succinct example of this effect is "Time", with more than a dozen different clocks going off at once with different sounds and clangs. This segues perfectly into a metronome pacing in "The Great Gig In The Sky", first bringing the vocals of Clare Torry into the album.
"Money" is magnificent with its use of 5.1 sounds of cash, registers, calcultors and the lot, each coming from different speakers actually producing the beat and beginning of this great song that catapults into the main bass line and rock anthem that is only "Money". Its one of the most exciting songs on the album for pure power. Another single, "Us and Them" takes the listener into a completely hypnotic nether-world of calm relaxation. The last third of the album, ("Any Color You Like", "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse"), bring all the previous songs and motifs together for a Pink Floyd/Clare Torry finale that builds and builds to a grand finale that never once falters nor fails to satisfy.
Continually selling for decades, "Dark Side of the Moon" is a piece of history that never feels dated out of fashion. I am sure there are millions of people who have heard this album thousands of times and always hear a little something new. It's great in stereo, but the SACD 5.1 Multi-Channel Surround Sound in a good system is an experience not to be missed. I admit that I spent nearly two thousand dollars on a system, just so I could experience exactly what Pink Floyd wanted their fans to. It is a real masterpiece.
Free Music Review: A Darker Side of Pink Floyd
Hit: 5 Stars
The Dark side of the Moon is possibly the most critically acclaimed recording in Pink Floyd's entire oeuvre, and indeed, I would call it a work of pure genius! With the smooth vocals of Roger Waters and the lead guitar work of David Gilmour Dark Side is a profoundly emotional and angst ridden musical experience. Released in 1973 it was an immediate hit with a youthful generation that felt disenfranchised and marginalized by society, and with its mind expanding post-psychedelic soundscape it also appealed to disillusioned older hippies. As an album Dark Side is thematically darker and more brooding than those produced during the Syd Barrett era Floyd, but is unquestionably an album to thoroughly immerse oneself in. The more one listens to it the more one starts to appreciate what a truly revolutionary album it was for its time; and with its multilayered, complicated sound structures and reflective lyrics it begs to be listened to again and again and again... for it never becomes boring or dull. As one of my all time favorite albums I would certainly call Dark Side a "classic album" of considerable artistic merit. The Dark Side of the Moon was produced in an era when individual bands had more room to improvise, experiment and express their full creativity; for the big music companies did not yet have as much of a commercial stranglehold on the creative process as they seem too these days. Groups of this time were more radical and nonconformist and would not easily toe the line set by big business executives, and that makes me wonder if an album like Dark Side could even be made today. The rebellious spirit of rock has I'm sorry to say been compromised to such an extent in the age of trashy reality television shows like American Idol or commercially slick programs such as MTV, that image has become in many ways more important than the music itself. That's not to say that there aren't some amazingly cool modern bands out there making the music they want to, and if you keep an open mind you will find them. But really there haven't been many rock groups in recent decades that have captured the spirit of an entire generation, though in their time Pink Floyd certainly did. The Dark Side of the Moon could in some ways be seen as the final swansong of the counterculture movement, and as a fitting soundtrack to the closing of that idealistic generations naive social experiment.
If you're going to start collecting the albums of Pink Floyd I suggest that you start with The Dark Side of the Moon, followed by Wish You Were Here, Meddle and The Wall. They're all now available in remastered editions and The Dark Side of the Moon has even been transfered into the SACD format, so the clarity is absolutely amazing! Much of the music of this fascinatingly complex era is timeless and remains as creatively inspiring as ever, and The Dark Side of the Moon embodies this outstanding spirit of quality. So turn on, tune in and drop out!
Free Music Review: THE DARK SIDE OF FLOYD NOW ON SACD
Hit: 5 Stars
This review is for the SACD version of THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. I am not going to attempt to review the music of DARK SIDE, this review is strictly regarding the SACD pressing and mixing. To begin with, I have extensive experience with THE DARK SIDE. I am of the age where I bought this album on vinyl when it first came out, I have owned it on MOBILE FIDELITY SOUND LABS ORIGINAL MASTER RECORDING both on vinyl and on CD, and through my cousin, Mike Licari, I have experienced this musical masterpiece in its original 4 channel (quadrophonic) mix via both quad vinyl as well as reel to reel. So then how does this version stack up to all of the previous versions?It must be remembered that this new SACD version of DARK SIDE is different than all other previous version, hence the name change. Logically, it has a different title and a different cover, so this is a different version. It is not meant to replace the older versions, it is meant to suppliment them. This new version is REMIXED, that is a very important distinction. This version of DARK SIDE was remixed from the original 16-track master tapes that have been in storage at Abbey Road Studios since the creation of DARK SIDE. This is only the third time that these original 16-track masters have been used, the first was to create the original 2-track master tapes that have been used over and over again to press all of the vinyl versions (including the MFSL version) as well as every CD ever made of this title (including the infamous Japanese Harvest), the second was to mix down the original quadrophonic version so famous in the seventies, and now to create this SACD hybrid version. Therefore tese original 16-track master tapes are comparitably virgin tapes that have been properly stored in vaults at the world famous Abbey Road Studios. Thus, THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON on SACD hybrid CD has a brand new mix, which warrants a new title and album cover, as well as a brand new vibrancy that makes this disc just scream with music.But this disc offers more than one new version, it offers three new versions. There is the plain old fashioned CD layer that offers a great stereo mix that sounds great due to the care taken in restoring the original music from the original tapes (restoring, not recreating), there is the now famous 5.1 channel mix in beautiful SACD direct stream digital, and there is a fine stereo mix in SACD for all of the audiophiles that can't make the pyschological jump to surround sound. With three versions of this great musical masterpiece, how can anyone fault this disc for its failure to meet your wants. It has everything for everyone. Yes it is brand new, it is not DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, it is THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, and that is the point.For any other questions regarding this disc, please read the great series of articals that are contained in the June 2003 issue of Sound and Vision, which includes interviews with the original engineer.