THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

The Dark Side of the Moon is Pink Floyd's most commercial succes and not without reason. Pink Floyd quit making long psychedlic space-tracks and made shorter pop-art songs some hit-potention. Most of the songs are slowly sung with some guitar and electronic accompany.

On the Run was one of the first progressive electronic songs. The same year "Zeit" was released by Tangerine Dream which was far more curious. In fact Pink Floyds "On the Run" is a spacy electronic rock song, which soon would be beaten by Klaus Schulze and Tangerine dream in both composition and atmosphere. But, still this song was quiet influential.

Time starts with many clocks ringing, which was a nice found. The song itself is one of the best of the record, because of the convincing vocals and nice guitar solo's. The background choir creates an american "soul" flavor to this song. The great gig in the sky is a song which lean's on the vocal capability of guest vocalist Clare Torry. In fact this song is all about one long vocal solo. Nice, but not brilliant. In my opinion the duration of this song is somewhat too long.

Money is song which I disliked in first instance. Maybe because of the many radio broadcasting of it. This song is okey, but not real good. The saxophone solo of another guest musician called Dick Parry is the best of the song. Us and Them is a slow art-pop song which is a bit booring, but in some way also relaxing and so is the rest of second half of the record.

What I'd really mis in this record is a composition of really distinctive quality. Meddle has Echoes, Atom Heart Mother has the brilliant titlesong, but TDSOFTM has no real great composition. Another complain is the step towards pop. This music doesn't sound really progressive anymore. It's not more prog than David Bowie or the Alan Parsons Project. In fact I was quiet amazed that Alan Parsons did not only produced this record, but also my favourable Atom Heart Mother. So, also he was not to blame for this step towards commercialism. It was Pink Floyd themselves.

Since I've a new element for my pick-up I do like this record a lot more then before. In fact the production of this record is quiet awesom. This will never be my favourite PF-record and I thought of it being a step backwards. But still 3 stars.