Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) [From Important Albums]
When people talk about Pink Floyd, they sound like a group I should love. They’ve got those conceptual songs, an interesting sound and, of course, they’re a progressive rock band. However, going through their albums a first time, none of them hooked me. I’m willing to give them a second shot, so I’m going to work through some of their biggest albums again, starting with The Dark Side of the Moon.
I like this album the most when it’s pure music. The slow pacing, the rhythmic building of a lot of these songs is soothing and mysterious. The slow, rhythmic building in Time and the majority of On the Run and the opening of Us and Them are all wonderful music moments.
However, once we get to the lyrics of a lot of these songs I find myself a bit annoyed. Breathe, for instance has a line “And all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be” that I just find extremely trite amid sounds that’s mysterious and ethereal as these. It’s a weird declaration of Empiricism in an album that seems to be immersed in ambiguous sounds.
Then, in Time, you’ve got this bit:
Home, Home again
I like to be here, When I can
When I come home, Cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones, Beside the fire
Within the music, once again, I find the lyrics at tension with the sounds. The music sounds out of this world and yet the song is talking about this feeling for home and the familiar. I don’t buy it. I find it annoyingly out of place. This bit also gets to another problem with the lyrics: they’re too meandering. You can see in those lines a sort of tempo, like a poem, but in the song each line seems to languish until it fades.
However, I do really like some of these tracks. Money is great and easily my favorite track from the album. The sound sampling, the rhythm, the lyrics, all of it come together in a way that produces something I just don’t feel with a lot of the other songs in the album. Brain Damage/Eclipse is another song where I think the sound, tone, pacing and lyrics come together for me, but not quite as much as Money.
The Dark Side of the Moon is a good album. I like its sound, but the lyrics get in the way and it just doesn’t grab me as much as other prog albums. It’s a bit too intangible and elusive for me. It’s good, I get why people like it, but it doesn’t do much for me.