THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

This album's been discussed over and over, let's do it one more time. BEST Pink Floyd album? On the odd day, I might prefer Meddle (for Echoes), Animals (for Dogs), The Wall (for being such a weird creature of an album) and even Atom Heart Mother(for influencing Pink Floyd's sound in their subsequent albums). But 9 out of 10 times, I would say without a blink, Dark Side of The Moon.

It's the one Pink Floyd album that blends variety with unformity. There's the mid-tempo pensive rocker-turned-ballad Time, there's the catchy-as-hell Money, candlelight dinner table mood of Us and them and the brooding finality of Brain Damage and Us and them. Each of these songs entirely different moods and at the same time seem to flow from and into each other. Why, even the 'vocal instrumental' The Great Gig in the sky and the Gilmour-Wright jam session Any colour you like blend perfectly with the overall atmosphere of the album. Needless to say, all members of the band are in full flow, though they have had their best moments in different albums and at different times. Roger Waters gets his point across without any of the bombast and self-importance of The Wall and still sends shivers down the spine when you actually stop floating in the pleasant music and take a deeper look at the lyrics. All in all, it's as perfect as Floyd can get.

This impossible perfection of the craft in turn has brought with it the commercial labelling. I would label WYWH commercial, so too Division Bell and even The Wall (sure the topics are too depressing for the average pop buff, but Another Brick in The Wall Part-2 was written for and only for the charts). But this? Naah! The musical concept and execution of it are just pristine and precise. The fact that it was accessible to a mainstream audience doesn't make it commercial-oriented. I like to think it was one of those few moments in the annals of rock music when genius won the day and great music managed to win the selling game as well. I would give anything for those times to come back again - when stuff like Dark Side and Led Zeppelin IV actually won over both armchair critics and the general public and it wasn't necessary to do pop to rule the charts. After all, a band has to feed itself at the end of the day and the only way to do it is to push the copies off the shelves fast and for as long as possible.

Dark Side has achieved that by continuing to sell more copies to this day. And when an album of a bygone era wins new fans for itself and the band, I believe it cannot be due to its 'commercial' qualities - anything commercial has a woefully short shelf life. Just as bookworms dig out classics written centuries ago, prog fans of times to come will continue to discover Dark Side and in turn Pink Floyd.