REVIEW
THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Andrés De La Garza
The First Album from the Roger Waters’ Era “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, consists of 10 tracks with a runtime of 42 minutes and 53 seconds. The first track in this album is a great starter. “Speak to Me”, a short track that contains an ambient drone that continues until the start of the second track, “Breathe (In the Air)”, a subtle psychedelic song with a growing bass guitar line and a guitar with reverb and delay making a string-sounding like tone that haunts the listener during the whole track. David Gilmour’s vocals are melancholic and beautiful during the whole album, but in this track it stands out.
“On the Run” is a great example of why this album inspired other genres such as electronic, experimental and drone. Pink Floyd experimented with their sound a lot during this period and created a track made up of a synth arpeggio which gradually increases from a low frequency to a high frequency and incorporated samples from spoken word passages and manipulated those samples with delay and distortion. “Time”, the second most popular song in this album is also a great example of sound experimentation. The track starts with alarms from clocks making an ambient/drone to continue with single strummed guitar notes and a synth-like piano jamming over the guitar. Psychedelic music consists of tribal drums and Pink Floyd used them incredibly in this song particularly because the percussion increases slowly and when the jam is starting to end, Nick Mason introduces a fill to start the song. The song also features one of the most iconic solos ever recorded. When the song is thought to end, Pink Floyd jam over the progression of “Breathe (In the Air)” and Gilmour starts with the lyric: “Home, home again” making a subtle change of pace in the song that fits perfectly with their experimentation. After this track: one of the most epic-sounding songs of all time is introduced: “The Great Gig in the Sky”. This track features a chord progression played with a piano that feels like a ballad, after some spoken word samples, Pink Floyd feature a gospel singer, Clare Torry to improvise on the song. Here we can hear some experimenting with genres, like vocal-jazz and a more ambitious way to psychedelic rock.
Entering the B-side of the album, it starts with the track “Money” which has progressive rock influences, art rock and space rock. The track starts off with an odd time signature measuring 7/4, a tenor saxophone solo, a guitar solo and it ends with a looping outro that fades to the other song. “Money” is an excellent example of a psychedelic rock song with art elements such as incorporating saxophone and odd time signatures. The B-side of the album is known to be a medley because each following song after “Money” combines with the next, ending in a loop at the end that connects with the start. The following track “Us and Them” starts with an ambient synth which then follows it with a slow-picked guitar which makes a beautiful harmonization with the echoed vocals and the bass. The song becomes bigger when the piano and saxophone enter the mix and it changes in two ways, part A and B making the vocals and the lyrics stand out more. The next songs follow a medley which doesn’t have any drastic changes and the last 16 minutes from the album feel like one song combined in a style of progressive and psychedelic rock.