Pink Floyd Paper

Dark side of the moon review The album that I chose to review for this project is my favorite Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon. Pink Floyd is a four piece psychedelic rock band that originally consisted of Roger Waters on the bass guitar and vocals, Nick Mason on the drums, Richard Wright on the keyboard and backing vocals, and Syd Barrett on vocals and guitar who was eventually replaced with the legend that is David Gilmore. The album was recorded in June 1972 – January 1973 at the Abbey Roads Studios in London England. This was Pink Floyds sixth studio album eighth overall and was released in March of 1973 and was a great success “Topping the billboard charts for one week it remained on the charts for 741 weeks…. With an estimated 45 million copies sold. ” (Wikipedia) Pink Floyd is a Psychedelic rock band that came out of Cambridge, England in 196574. he band began playing covers of old American Rhythm and Blues songs until Syd Barrett, their original guitarist, began writing songs and moved the group into the psychedelic rock movement. Pink Floyd said they were influenced by Jimi Hendrix because of the way that he experimented with different sounds and improvised on the guitar. They also were heavily influenced by a band called Can who helped start the psychedelic movement in Europe. Pink Floyd fits well in progressive rock and psychedelic rock genre because they incorporate a lot of different sounds and use many effects in the music they play. They try to replicate and or enhance the effects of mind altering drugs which were very popular during the late 1960’s and 70’s, this is shown in the song “on the run” where there is a lot of different effects and sounds that may confuse the conventional rock listener. They have also been said to fit in the progressive rock genre because they pushed the boundaries with their music and went beyond the classic verse-chorus based song structures. Pink Floyd always pushed their music but dark side of the moon was the first time that they went all out using multi track recording, tape loops, and analogue synthesizers which gave it the very unique “pink Floyd sound” and was the most technically advanced way to produce an album at the time. It was their eighth album and helped introduce a lot of people to their music. The song that helped sell the album was the sixth track “Money”. Money was very unique compared to the other music of the time because it started off with the sound of money hitting the ground and was not on a conventional 4/4 time but a 7/4 because of the double tracking. Fans had never really heard music put this way and really took well off it. Even though this album was released late in their career many fans consider it the beginning of the real Pink Floyd era. I believe Dark Side of the Moon falls really well in the psychedelic genre because of the unique way they made the album. The album is a whole entity in that to its hard to just take out one or a few songs because you wouldn’t be able to grasp what they were trying to present to you. With that being said I chose the songs that I believe were the most unique because they pushed the boundaries of music at the time by incorporating many different kinds of producing techniques and helped people get introduced to the album. The first song on the album “ Speak to me” is a great example of what is to come on the rest of the album and shows off the different producing effects they used like the over dubbing of cash registers which is a foreshadowing of what is to come later on in the album in the song Money. The song starts off with a man arguing with someone about how he can’t explain his anger then transitions to people laughing and a person screaming in the distance and grows louder and louder until the synthesizer takes over and the band enters into “ Breathe”. People generally say that these two songs should have been put into one five minute song but it would have changed the feel of the song. This song shows off David Gilmour’s slide guitar and lead vocals in his gentle and warm timbres. The lyrics were written by Roger Waters and he tries to make the listener take notice of the smaller things in life which is different than what people generally see life as which is just to work. The song goes off of a 4 bar measure and has a slow tempo. The song ends abruptly because it is followed immediately by the song “on the run”. The next song that I’m going to be evaluating is the song “money”. The song starts off with the sound of cash registers opening and closing which are full of change. They keep a very good harmony during the whole song with the use of different instruments like the tenor saxophone, slide guitar, synthesizers, and piano. The song’s lyrics say that money rules the world and that a person’s social class is determined by how much money they have. It says that money is the root of all evil and so you should share it with people but when you ask they never give you any. Dark Side of the Moon has gone on to be one of Pink Floyds most successful albums and has had a profound effect on other musicians like Phish and David Bowie, and has also been tied to the Wizard of Oz controversy. All in all it was and always will be a landmark in Psychedelic rock.

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