Pink Floyd

Adding something new about a band that has been all too celebrated, and has become a firm icon of our time, isn't easy. I'll try, then, to offer just a few thoughts on a musical phenomenon that still sparks debate today, albeit now only for its colossal commercial sales rather than its artistic merits. With that said, it's time to tackle their most criticized, celebrated, mythologized and pilloried masterpiece all at once: "The Dark Side Of The Moon".

It's entirely possible that Pink Floyd made better albums than "The Dark Side of the Moon", at least where pure songwriting is concerned. The key question that any self-respecting rock critic ought to place at the heart of their analysis, when dealing with the band during the Roger Waters era, is what Pink Floyd's musical mission actually was, and how brilliantly they carried it out: will they be remembered and celebrated more for the extraordinary innovations and evolutions they brought to sound, earning them the title of "producers of food for the mind," or for their ability to fuse sound, hype and towering walls of sound saturated with color and neo-psychedelic distortion with superb melodies, still regarded today as rock archetypes? "The Dark Side Of The Moon", the unsurpassed sonic-musical trademark of the Waters-led Pink Floyd, doesn't settle the question.

Within the context of 20th-century popular music, "The Dark Side Of The Moon" stands as a rich laboratory of post-lysergic experiments, bordering on the boldest art-rock of the early Seventies. The undisputed master of this "sound revolution" is Roger Waters, who, as Floyd's resident alchemist, had already taken the helm from Syd Barrett back in 1968, setting himself up as an obsessive, uncontrollable seeker of new sonic territory that would make the "Floyd sound" universal and instantly recognizable across the globe. But one cannot help lavishing praise (and counter-praise) on the meticulously crafted, almost obsessive audio engineering etched into the record's grooves, thanks to the work of a sound engineer of the caliber of Alan Parsons, the true jewel and musical-ideological epicenter of the whole operation.

Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright, orphaned of Syd Barrett's anarchic, spaced-out genius, pressed on, embarking on a path (starting with the famous double album "Ummagumma", half live, half studio) capable of reaching heights of sublime, often pleasantly cryptic cerebral intensity, feeding a still-unseasoned audience their explorations and unusual pairings of noise, dissected by an "insatiable" Waters and skillfully translated into captivating glimpses of everyday life. A everyday life in seemingly bizarre contrast with the often ungovernable, arcane complexity of a mind like Waters', ravaged by paranoia and macabre visions, forever oscillating between dream and reality, schizophrenia and solemn flashes of lucidity.

"The Dark Side of the Moon" was released on March 1st in the US and on the 16th in Europe, and much of the critical establishment would go on to hail it as Pink Floyd's unsurpassed masterpiece. That's only partly true: the fact that it brings together, incomparably, all of Waters' ideological and symbolic contradictions doesn't fully justify that title. If we step back from the Moon and plant our feet on Earth, the album is, and always will be, regarded as a superb, unrivaled revolutionary work (if we consider it strictly from a "cerebral-dreamlike," "sonic/conceptual" standpoint), but merely decent if we strip it down to the bone, stripping away its sonic body and exposing the less-than-inspired tracks, starting with the insipid "Money," then moving through the tricks (sometimes crowd-pleasing, sometimes genuinely bewitching to our minds, forever hungry for "lysergic sustenance") of "Speak To Me" and "On The Run" - tracks that nonetheless perfectly capture our protagonist's state of anxiety, blending noise and avant-garde sonic solutions into moments of intense sonic-spatial power, laying out the coordinates on which the pessimistic worldview of a thoroughly disoriented Waters rests, a genuine ambassador of the theme of incommunicability, of which "The Dark Side" stands as a complete, dramatic portrait.

There's no shortage, to be fair, of moments of intense, absolute lyricism, as "Time" demonstrates, gripping in its joyous fusion of lyrics and music, a step forward for a still not fully developed philosophical concept within rock's parameters, a superb display of mental and intellectual clarity from the quartet; the track also features an overflowing (in a strictly lyrical/evocative sense), disarming Gilmour guitar solo: one gets the sense it's meant to accompany a bold, anarchic explorer's journey through time, forever caught in a state of anxious curiosity. In short: the triumph of suggestion, and one of the most intense passages in the entire Floyd catalogue.

The first half of the album closes out with an elegy to madness, but also, at the same time, to human freedom, oppressed by a society that seeks to crush it: "The Great Gig In The Sky", dominated by Clare Torry's soul-gospel-derived vocalizations, able to fuse blazing lyricism with an almost cinematic sense of drama. In this gripping, harrowing fragment of his life, man seems to soar toward the sky, seeking to carve out an opening through which he might reign undisturbed and majestic, far from the noise and injustice of earthly reality.

"Us And Them" seems to want to echo "Breathe In the Air", but the melody, though 100% pinkfloydian, works best within the context of the album as a whole. Much the same could be said of "The Dark Side Of The Moon" in general: what makes this work immortal is its unconventional relationship with the art-system of its era, captured here from every possible angle. For rock music, it marked a prodigious leap toward a futuristic era yet to come.

The same yardstick applied to the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's" applies to "The Dark Side": "Sgt. Pepper" may not be, musically speaking, the Beatles' finest hour, but it brought about a revolution - perhaps the most significant and far-reaching in the history of pop music. The same can be said of "The Dark Side Of The Moon": like "Sgt. Pepper's", it marked, for Pink Floyd, the definitive attainment of "rock demigod" status, helped along by the grandiloquent, kaleidoscopic sonic blanket draped over the album's songs. And no one can deny the importance the "dark side of the Moon" held within the historical context of the Seventies, a decade defined by an incessant, obsessive quest for new avant-garde techniques within the recording studio.

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05/11/2006