Sunday, December 20, 2009

AR: Dark Side of the Moon


Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

We appear to be stuck in the upper register lately... DSoTM is an obvious pantheon member and easily one of my favorite albums. PF came to San Antonio on a legendary 1994 weekend; all the cool kids grabbed those Division Bell shirts, but I picked the black and rainbow DSotM cover edition off the rack - 21 years late, but at least I was evincing a modicum of taste. I even pulled the usual dork move and wore the t-shirt the following day to school; this would normally earn me all kinds of that-guy points, except that cool teacher Dee Brady noticed my selection and commented on how great it was that some of the youth today still knew what was what. YEAH (in as far as knowing what is what constitutes being a fan of one of the best-selling albums of all time, I was right there)! So I was in with the 40 year-olds if not with my peers (a path I think well worth taking). Of course I was, because why on earth would you not spend $25 on a chintzy t-shirt that commemorates one of the best albums EVAH? I'll never understand my peers. Or kids these days. Whatever.

I can't remember what initially clued me in to this album - I am sure I had heard of the Wizard of Oz dilly* somewhere, but that was not the driving factor. KZEP played a slew of songs off the album *all the time* - "Money" in particular, but "Us and Them," "Time," "Brain Damage" and even "Great Gig in the Sky" all made regular appearances. I vaguely remember seeing the guitar music for "Money" in a Guitar magazine somewhere along the line, and that may have very well been the final push that got me into the record store to join the multi-millions. I definitely listened to it on headphones on my aforementioned speakerless CD player, and that combined with the fact that my copy was an awkwardly-boxed 20th Anniversary edition (with a large XX and a small iconic prism-light emblem on the cover) clues me in that I must have obtained it in 1993. I may not remember the exact date, but I remember the mall record store where I purchased it at a too expensive but worth it for a legendary album 20 dollars. And I remember the album itself - the anniversary edition (which, incidentally, was too big to fit into any standard-sized CD slot - thanks, Capitol!) included a bunch of slick graphic postcards and a brilliant insert booklet with lyrics. I *pored* over that booklet, I tell you what, any time I was listening to the album in the unofficial mode (i.e., with the lights on). On other occasions, I passed on your typical chemically-induced psychedelic experiences in favor of the easy light orbs available behind my eye-lids. It's a perfect soundtrack for those all-but-the-aural-one sensory deprivation experiences.

* - Just in case you live in Soviet Russia where DSotM and WoO sync you, there is a largely discredited rumor that Dark Side was composed to match up with Wizard. There's all kinds of accompanying mythology - you have to start the music at the third lion's roar to time it right, isn't it weird that "Money" comes on right as it changes to color, the album ends on a heartbeat right as the film zooms in on the Tin Man's chest, etc. It is quite a nifty experience, I'll say - the band entirely denies it, of course, but many scenes, like the one with the wicked witch and Dorothy matched by "black ... and blue" will definitely cause you pause. Check it out if you get a chance; I am sure the internets are rife with links.

It would be easy enough to wax on about the psychedelic majesty of this disc and the utterly serene effect it brings, but that's nowhere near the half of it. Pink Floyd had been experimenting and taking songs into the stratosphere well before 1973, and you could easily argue that Meddle is farther out there in terms of extended space rock. So that uniquely Floydish grandeur and sonic space is not new here. The truly nice thing is the containment - that experimentation has been encapsulated into utterly powerful packages with a variety of styles that flow impossibly into one another. Those packages are split into two sides, each a continuous composition - the first a sort of outline of birth to death, the second a commentary on crass commercialism and various struggles to socially exist / maintain sanity in contemporary society. All songs are, as allmusic describes it, "immaculately produced," and it was no small feat to maintain a cohesive "album sound" given the variety of instrumentation and voices on the disc. It's a downright sheen - sets a benchmark for what I think of as "crystalline sound," and manages to maintain a effortless, leisurely pace despite the tension inherent in the songs. Not to mention the tape loop effects, the incorporation of ambient spoken word, the quadrophonic stereo dynamics that make your head swim in the headphone experience... yeah. And all of this surrounds great songs - cool structures, great lyrics, incendiary soloage, and no dull moments on the disc. None!

So if you take a gander back at my album ratings system, you'll note that Dark Side effectively has it all - great flow / cohesion AND variety, no dips (and a number of high altitude peaks), ridiculous stars stats (four(!) fives, two fours, and three threes), a great opener / closer that starts/ends on the same heartbeat, permitting infinite looping, and a solid dose of mystique taboot. Hell, it even has an iconic cover and a great title (with "moon" referring to lunacy and PF's spaced out tendencies). And it even meets the rock peaked in 1974 requirement (if a little more literally than I meant, and, um, close enough). Call me a populist, as lavishing praise on this album is pretty much an act of playing along with the masses and critics alike, but it just *is* the sort of artistic achievement that makes the majority of albums seem slapped together and uninspired by comparison. So I could end right now, utter the words "desert" and "island" (which are probably losing their effect with this many in a row, oops) and let you know that "Time" is my favorite track. But that would be sacrilege, right? So skip to the bottom if my t-by-t takes bore you.

Dark Side quietly fades into life with a faint, steady heartbeat. "Speak to Me" adds on ambient effects - a watch tick, water drips, an agitated (but very low volume voice) that claims he's "been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks," and a cash register, all of which click in a strange daily life rhythm. A second voice chimes, "I've always been mad," more voices scrum beneath the surface, and a hideous, stereotypical maniacal laugh clicks in, crescendoing as more industrial sounds rattle. A four-time scream explodes in volume to the perfect smooth opening chord of "Breathe," taking us straight from that one minute excursion of psychosis into a wide landscape relief...

"Breathe" is a slow, echoing soundscape, starting the first instrumental section of the album in drenched psychedelia. After the cacophonous opening, the song comes as sweet relief - this is about as laid-back trippy as things get. The lyrics soothe despite their somewhat cynical content: "Breathe, breathe in the air / Don't be afraid to care" before several lines that point out the more limited and Sisyphean aspects of modern life. The song fades perfectly into

"On the Run" - an instrumental fast-paced passage of paranoia and general discomfort. The coolest thing about this tune is the way it was recorded - the main organ line is a riff played on a synthesizer, sped up severely and looped indefinitely. A high hat drum drives the beat, flanged sound effects jump all over the place and airplane / laser-beam fly overs swim around the track as PF abuses the stereo features of the recording. An overhead airport announcement blares airplane departure times, and a voice chimes in somewhere in the middle "Live for today, gone tomorrow, that's me" just before a siren wails overhead. More laughter and a bomb / plane crash to close - a disquieting track to say the least, and its echoing footsteps on marble of the runner "run" right into an army of clicking tocks and the sudden burst of

"Time" - A clock shop's worth of grandfather clock / alarm clock / you-name-it-clocks explode to open this track, and after your nerves slightly recover, the tick-tock-tick-tock electric drumbeat leads to the album's second spaced out area of psychedelic grandeur. The drawn out intro to "Time" is perfect; sparse, despite the myriad things going on - a lead guitar riff, a tinkling organ, a drum solo-ish kind of free-form beat. A song about the limited nature of our existence starts with a jam-out that takes its sweet time. Nice. All of this collides at the 2:30 mark into a down and dirty funked out blast of the awesomes. I lack language for how much I enjoy this track. The opening lyrics are incredible:

"Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day / Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way / Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown / Waiting for someone for something to show you the waaaaay/ Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain / You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today / And then one day you find ten years have got behind you /No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun."

The first part is over a slinky sick guitar part, and after "waaaay" it goes over a multi-tracked angelic chorus of oohs. Too good - but after "gun," in kicks a roaring, reverbed, chorused, arena-drenching guitar solo of existential bliss. Seriously, a pantheon effort, all the way through to its wind down which segues to the next verse perfectly. I have to put the second verse down, too, because the lines here are classic:

"So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking / Racing around to come up behind you again / The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older / Shorter of breath and one day closer to death/Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time / Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines / Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way / The time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say."

Great stuff, if you're into frank acknowledgments of mortality and all. At the tail end of "Time" we get "Breathe Reprise," a minute more of the initial laid-back space track.

"The Great Gig in the Sky" - a lovely piano ballad with slide guitar accents that famously features a rather insane vocal improv performance from Clare Torry. Though a spoken word lyric assures that, "And I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do; I don't mind," the death wail contained herein certainly captures death's fear along with its sweet relief. This is one of the stupider tracks to write about, as its all about the lilting vocal - check it out. "Great Gig" concludes side one on a somber fade out. Side two, natch opens with the cash register rhythm of

"Money" - I refuse to believe that anyone doesn't know this arch sarcastic take on capitalism, hasn't heard it on the radio a billion times and doesn't know that it's signature riff is in 7/4 time. I'll just throw on that its groove, however many times you've heard it, is sublime. And that this 7/4 song has a best-ever saxophone solo in it ... that gives way to a nasty melt-your-face guitar solo over a 4/4 bridge ... that fades into a more subdued but equally nasty guitar solo ... that fades back up to the face-melter from before! Incredible sequence! The pyro fallout still smolders as the song kicks back into its 7/4 riff gear to close with a final verse. It's amazing that despite the overplay this song has gotten on the FM dial, it still manages to slay me. It ends with some spoken word over the fading riff into the church organ sound of

"Us and Them" is a very, very slow number accented by a saccharine, late night saxophone howl. It features a rather over-the-top chorus with lyrics lamenting war - the whole song is sort of a lament of arbitrary differentiation of opposites. There's an extended instrumental section from about 4:40 to 6:00 (this is the longest track on the disc at 7:41, btw). It's a poignant tune - and again, achieves a magnificent, serene effect. It also has the astounding feature of the last notes segueing into

"Any Colour You'd Like" - a mid tempo instrumental number with layered, swirling, and echoing-in-round synthesizers, syncopated rhythms, a funk bassline ... and a divine breakdown at the 1:20 mark. Two guitars go into a deft interplay that evokes image of the funkiest call and response dance I can imagine. This song is a five-star killer all the way through - its 3:26 was clearly born of a jam session, but wow did they hit it. And they even wind the jam down so that it snuggles against

"Brain Damage" - A simple guitar riff song that reminds me a whole lot of the opening notes of "Wild Honey Pie" and the general pattern of "Dear Prudence" from the White Album, this is the most overt tribute to Syd Barret (the long-departed and gone-insane member of Pink Floyd). The lyrics are generally about conformist notions of (in)sanity and contain the eponymous "And if the band you're in starts singin' different tunes / I'll see you on the dark side of the moon." Great, trippy number, nicely backed by soulful singers; it often gets paired (and rightly so, because of the seamless transition between the two) with

"Eclipse" - Holy mother of album closers. This is a big, bring-down-the-house sum up of all that has gone before, with full band, pentecostal organ riffs, choir-backing. The lyrics, because they make the tune (with a serious run-on sentence and seemingly arbitrary inclusion of the word "And" throughout):

"All that you touch / And all that you see / And all that you taste / All you feel / And all that you love /And all that you hate / All you distrust / All you save /And all that you give / And all that you deal / And all that you buy, / Beg, borrow or steal / And all you create / And all you destroy/ And all that you do / And all that you say / And all that you eat / And everyone you meet / And all that you slight / And everyone you fight / And all that is now / And all that is gone / And all that's to come / And everything under the sun is in tune / But the sun is eclipsed by the moon."

The album ends with a perfect punctuating final chord and the aforementioned thirty-second heartbeat fade. A parting spoken word shot is delivered, too: "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark." Just a great, great work - it's beautiful regardless, but if you have any penchant for psychedelia and the blues rockers / synthesizer experimentation that pepper this album, you'll have the same harmonious response to this one that I do. And if you get too locked in that ear to ear smile and don't pay attention, your album will loop heartbeats to heartbeats and you'll be back in for another Infinite Jest of a ride.

Pretty obvious that DSotM is the disc that will make it into the desert island suitcase even if I get shipped to a second desert island and have to pare down the original group. Part of it is probably due to my biases for certain types of music, my taste for jams, etc.; I'm not going to argue with others who tend to put this in the 50 range of their top 500 album lists. Shimon and I recently talked about PF and their tendency for sleeve-heart emoting. I'd argue that this album hits the perfect balance - grandiose in scope, dead serious, but so well-crafted as to negate accusations of pointless self-indulgence. Maybe that makes me the perpetual teenage would-be stoner who is fascinated by unsophisticated takes on madness and spacey instrumental passages. That's fine. But for me, Dark Side captures capital-I It and is a full realized work of art that is simultaneously exploratory, contained, crafted and certain-mood-evoking; I'd be yes, insane, to ask anything more.

Status: Desert Island Recommended
Nyet's Fave: "Time"

Addendum: Phish covered this album in its entirety before a small crowd in West Valley City, Utah, on 11.02.1998. This was all the more impressive as they had just covered The Velvet Underground's Loaded just two days before in Las Vegas. So I suppose they had two albums ready for Halloween that year. They segued to it straight out of the narrative section of "Harpua" - I don't need to tag a Phish lesson onto this already ridiculously long review, but they typically play a snippet of some song in the middle of "Harpua" as part of the narrative of what "Jimmy" is listening to on the radio or what have you - and it had to have been one of the more shocking / mind-blowing / OMFGWTFTTMHOORAY! moments for the people in the audience when the band kept playing the entire album. They do an exceedingly serviceable job, obviously lacking saxes, backup singers and tape loops and such, notably putting a particularly wacky spin on "Great Gig" by having Jon Fishman sing the thing falsetto and exuberantly. Solid work, everyone and their phishy moms wishes they could have been there, and this concludes the Phish cover albums series! YAY!

Also worth noting is that DSotM has been covered by a ton of bands, both live and in studio. One notable / popular version is Dub Side of the Moon, a reggae take on the disc. More interesting to me is that The Flaming Lips have announced their intention to release an official album cover of the LP. Wha? There's no predicting those guys, I guess - it should be interesting to see what they do with it, as sometimes they remain faithful to covers ("War Pigs," "Bohemian Rhapsody") and other times they go goofy ("Can't Get You Out of My Head," "Seven Nation Army"). We'll see. Alright, I think that's enough. :)

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