by Derek Johnson

Created on: November 04, 2008   Last Updated: November 20, 2008

Dark Side of the Moon Album Review

Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd is a masterpiece for the ears. It is full of sonic booms and bangs that travel from speaker to speaker like a crazy train. The album is for music listeners who appreciate the avant-garde, minimalism and ambience. Guitars, synthesizers, drums, bass and the most hi-tech equipment of the day were used to construct this rock music milestone.

In 1972, Roger Waters, the bassist for the group, was feeling life was going by too fast for him and he wanted to slow down and analyze it. So he broke it down into key themes for this new album: First, there is the human lifetime which is the umbrella for the album. Appropriately, a heartbeat starts off the opening track "Speak to Me/Breathe", created by the bass drums of Nick Mason, the drummer and percussionist. The track segues into "On the Run" which incorporates many of the sounds the listener hears throughout the album: Footsteps, clocks, airplanes landing and so forth which grabs the audience by their ears. The song shows the maniac pace that life takes us on, and how humans are always on the run, traveling from place to place. Life goes by and according to Waters people are preconditioned by our parents and society to think that life starts when our higher education is finished and when we are out on our own. This is not the case, life begins as soon as we are born, and that is the theme of the song "Time": `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.'. Waters shows that time waits for no one and if you don't live life to the fullest, it will just waste away. "Great Gig in the Sky" includes an instrumental piece with guitarist David Gilmour on the lap pedal, keyboardist Richard Wright's piano work and an improvisational vocal by session vocalist Clare Torry. Torry scats throughout the song. Scat singing is a jazz term, meaning that the vocalist just improvises over music with humming and what not. The song can be interpreted as a song about death, even though there are many interpretations. The vocal highs and lows match the musical flow in the background, showing the successes and depressions we all go through in life; Torry's voice speeds up, her volume increases, and then she slows down after the climax. "Money" is a song about the good and bad sides to our dead presidents. You can get everything you want if you

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