THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON

I hesitated a little before awarding this album a full five stars. Let's just confess the truth: it's so terribly well-known! You wouldn't tell the world that THRILLER or even AQUALUNG was one of your favourite albums, would you? As a critic, you ought to sound just a LITTLE sophisticated...

Such objections are useless. No matter how I look at it, DARK SIDE is perhaps the most perfect masterpiece in prog history. Other albums, by different artists, may mean more to me, but I can think of no other sequence of songs in prog that is as famous as this and yet so flawless and gripping. As any Floyd fan will tell you, this is the album the band had longed to make ever since Syd Barrett's early retirement. Not a second is wasted; all those VCS3 synths and funny sound effects are JUST right (back in the seventies, DARK SIDE was used to demonstrate the virtues of hundreds of thousands of stereo systems); the lyrics are meaningful without sounding silly (in prog, a comparative rarity); Dave Gilmour's guitar solos are majestic (particularly the one on 'Time'); and those vocals - there's no need to list them here, since each and every one is a delight.

I doff my hat. Classics just don't come any more classical.