#43 Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd

This band, like Led Zeppelin, tends to get a bad reputation by we non-music snobs mostly because of the people we see wearing "Dark Side of the Moon" t-shirts.  These individuals look more interesting than those I talked about in the Led Zeppelin IV post; but nevertheless, their long stringy puke flecked dreads and the "just raped" look they give off (like models posing for Cosmopolitan Magazine) as they stare into space doesn't usually make me want to go buy a Pink Floyd album.  They tend to be mid-forties, strung out, with the permanent occupation of "looking for work."  No offense to a great friend of mine whose favorite band happens to be Pink Floyd; dood, you are soooo excluded from this category.

Having said that, I found this album very enjoyable.  It is all the things you've heard about it, if you've never listened to it before.  It's "weird."  "You might like it better if you weren't sober."  etc. but what I thought was so excellent about this album is for the first time since I began this project I really felt like it mattered that I listened to all the songs in the right order.  I've been very careful to make sure that my iPod is not on shuffle, or the cd isn't on random, just to make sure that I am hearing the album in the order the artists wanted me to.

With Dark Side of the Moon, man, the whole thing is one continuous EPIC song.  I loved it, from start to finish.  I listened to the whole album several times; two times didn't feel like enough to really attempt to comprehend what was going on.  There were so many existential themes like those found in "Time" "Us and Them" and other songs that pointed out illusions and bullshit like in"Money."  Not to mention that "Brain Damage" juxtaposes the sane vs the insane and I got the feeling that insanity is all about who is pointing fingers and who perceives who to be insane.  While at work in a courthouse in the middle of nowhere, with many people I don't know, I kept thinking "the lunatics are in my hall" but maybe that had nothing to do with Pink Floyd.

The album is very deep and in ways that are hard to pin down.  I could listen to the whole thing and miss it or have moments of flash inspiration only to be mistaken that those were my own thoughts carrying me away.  And although they were inspired by the music, I found those thoughts had little to do with the lyrics I was listening to.  Perhaps I was picking up on a general feeling the music instills.  It's an emotion somewhere between disquietude and inspiration.  So anything really, great range katy, jeez.

The music is not generally to my taste; the strange instrumentals, the noises, the sound effects, but after listening to the album over and over, I couldn't get enough.  The more little epiphanies of Camusian absurdity I realized they were talking about the more my respect for this band grew, exponentially.  "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" are so awesome, especially one right after the other, concluding this amazing album that flows from thought to thought through song through song to end in this great crescendo about nothingness.  or absurdity.  or life.  or something less profound.

"I think every album was a step towards Dark Side of the Moon," keyboardist Rick Wright said. "We were learning all the time, the techniques of the recording and our writing was getting better." As a culmination of their inner-space explorations of the early 1970s, the Floyd toured the bulk of Dark Side in Britain for months prior to recording. But in the studio, the band articulated bassist Roger Waters' lyric reveries on the madness of everyday life with melodic precision ("Breathe," "Us and Them") and cinematic lustre (Clare Torry's guest vocal aria "The Great Gig in the Sky"). Dark Side is one of the best-produced rock albums ever, and "Money" may be rock's only Top Twenty hit in 7/8 time.