The Dark Side of the Moon [Vinyl] [Import]

Pink Floyd | Format: Vinyl

Product Details

• Vinyl (October 23, 2006)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Label: Emd Int'l
• ASIN: B0016CP48O
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1,568 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #941,343 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Speak to Me/Breathe

2. On the Run

3. Time

4. The Great Gig in the Sky

5. Money

6. Us and Them

7. Any Colour You Like

8. Brain Damage

9. Eclipse

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

558 of 609 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why DARK SIDE is Most Heralded Album of All-Time (5 STARS), June 19, 2001

By 

JWK "jwk" (Dallas, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Side of the Moon (Audio CD)

Studies have been conducted on the success of Pink Floyd's classic, best-of-the-best "Dark Side of the Moon." Some results are as follows:

*One in every 20 people under the age of 50 in the United States owns a copy of this album *Dark Side remained on Billboard's 200 album chart for an amazing 15 years straight and then for another two when it was remastered back in 1994 *It is currently the most successful album ever with upwards of 40 million copies sold world-wide

Now the question... WHY? Why should one album by a band back in 1973 have such outstanding achievments and admiration even today? Perhaps because of the time period. Look at other albums released the same year by bands like Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Rush, and the Doobie Brothers among several others. This was the year of rock perfection. Or maybe it was because of the rave for concept albums. Or the simple, yet unforgettable album cover.

More likely it was the band's chemistry and ability to make jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring, thought-provoking music. This is Pink Floyd at its collective finest, with everyone contributing. Unlike the band in 6 years, Waters did NOT do everything. Gilmoure took a huge chunk of the music-writing, laying down the chord progressions on "Breathe," "Time," and "Any Colour You Like;" the singing on the album's best songs, Water's conceeding to David's far superior voice; and pumping out what would later be hailed as some of rock's most influential lead-guitar riffs on "Money" and "Brain Damage." Wright got in on much of the writing as well with his keyboard contributions on "Breathe," the symphonic "Great Gig in the Sky," "Us and Them," and the amazing keybpard licks and effects on "Colour." Mason, who rarely contributed, put in his efforts on "Speak to Me," "Time," and the Waters-less "Colour." Finally, Roger Waters put down most of the album's music, laid down all the bass-lines as usual, thought up the album's concept, and wrote all the lyrics. If that's not enough, he made himself heard on "Brain Damage," "Eclipse," and the chorus of "Time." Anyway you put it, THIS is the true Pink Floyd; all contributing, all acknowledged.

The band's titanic success was continued on later albums like 1975's "Wish You Were Here," 1977's "Animals," and 1979's "The Wall," although by that time the band had begun to fall apart from Waters' power obsession. By 1983, the band had slipped to a Water's-solo-project version of itself, with "The Final Cut," and finally a break-up. But never would the band see the success or experience the musical genious of "Dark Side of the Moon." So pop this in, take another listen, and remember- even if you don't believe the hype- after this album, music would never be the same....

50 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Great music, terrible sound quality, October 1, 2011

By 

Ryan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dark Side of the Moon (Vinyl)

If you give a damn about sound quality, DO NOT buy this vinyl. EMI has done an insulting job of transferring what could arguably be called "the greatest album ever recorded" onto the vinyl medium. Now I'm not an audiophile whack job with a $15k turntable and pure gold speaker cables. But even I can tell the difference between what sounds like someone eating a mouthful of pop rocks with their mouth open [this album,] and quality quiet vinyl. This vinyl is incredibly noisy, and I was surprised by the quantity of surface defects that spanned multiple grooves, resulting in recurring "shchh" noise with every rotation of the record for up to a minute at a time [including at the beginning of The Great Gig in the Sky, of all places!] I was planning on purchasing EMIs new releases of Wish You Were Here and The Wall on vinyl too, but not any more.

I love Dark Side of the Moon and have it in several formats already. If you love this album too, do not purchase this version. Instead, seek out a used copy of Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's vinyl pressing from 1979. My 32-year-old MFSL copy puts this new edition to shame.

150 of 164 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still weird, but Pink Floyd streamlines their songwriting and find amazing critical & commercial success with this album, October 6, 2007

By 

Mike London "MAC" (Oxford, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Dark Side of the Moon (Audio CD)

The problem with some albums (most of The Beatles' catalogue, Zeppelin, Radiohead, etc) is so much has been written about them there's not a lot new to say. For DARK SIDE OF THE MOON I figured I'd examine the record more in the context of their catalogue overall, as this is not very often examined in Amazon reviws.

As I've said in other reviews, Pink Floyd has always been a weird band. There's a reason why they're considered the ultimate space-rock band. And while there are other albums in their catalogue that are even spacier and more strange than the perennial favorite DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (ATOM HEART MOTHER and PIPER AT THE GATES OF DOWN, to name but two), it is here, on this album, that the band trimmed back their wild experiments to manageable songs. And once the general public figured out what Pink Floyd was capable of, they bought the record in droves.

Pink Floyd has a sizeable catalogue that dates before DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. While the Pink Floyd Faithful know these albums, a lot of fans don't know these records, and if they go looking for another DARK SIDE, they are often puzzled at the music they do find. There's a reason for that.

Pre-1973, Pink Floyd was very much on the outer edges of rock music. Like The Grateful Dead, they played by their own rules, and invented and subverted their own musical forms into something druggy, ethereal, and far beyond the scope of any normal popsong. Listening to early Pink Floyd records is like an audio-acid trip, and it's surprising that not only did they get to release such experimental music, with no real chance of getting radioplay or singles, but they got to release so many albums of it. With today's market and expectations and pro-tools mentality of the quest for the perfect popsong that will be the next big hit, the early PF records would never have been released.

All this changed in 1972, when Pink Floyd released their criminally underrated soundtrack OBSCURED BY CLOUDS. The true precursor to DARK SIDE, OBSCURED was recorded just as the initial sessions for DARK SIDE began. Moving away from the side-long suites and long winding instrumentals, OBSCURED features 10 songs, only four of which are instrumentals, with the other six songs being very akin to the DARK SIDE songs. It is with OBSCURED that Pink Floyd began writing music that would be much more accessible to the general record-buying public.

Pink Floyd continued in the direction they began with OBSCURED BY CLOUDS. Streamlining their music, Pink Floyd forwent the rather bizarre experiments that made up the bulk of their previous work. But don't think they sold out. Everything in DARK SIDE has precedent in their previous work.

While there's nothing that truly sounded like DARK SIDE in 1973, the music sounds very much like a culmination of all their previous experimentation (not counting Barret's PIPER) dating from 1968 to 1972. But rather than let their audio love of sound effects get away with them ("Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast"), or draw their often fascinating instrumental music to gargantuan proportions ("Echoes", "Atom Heart Mother") that only prog fans will wade through, the band took the elements of their overall sound, streamlined it, and used much more accessible songwriting, but still being true to their artistic vision.

And it is a vision and a sound that a lot of people love. DARK SIDE epitomizes what the band was capable of. Filled with sound effects, spacey music, turbocharged [turbocharted] instrumentals, DARK SIDE takes elements from all of the band's previous albums and utilizes them here. A lot of the sound effect work is rather famous, especially the interview snippits that engineer Alan Parsons and the band sprinkled throughout the album. Paul McCartney was interviewed, but seasoned by years of media coverage, the band felt his answers were too guarded and not as off-the-cuff as they wanted. The "I'm drunk" line was by Henry McCullough. There's also a barely audible orchestral version of The Beatles "Ticket To Ride" that can be briefly heard at the end of "Eclipse".

Pink Floyd always had the potential to be not only great musicians and rock artists but also commercially. But let's not kid ourselves. Without DARK SIDE, they would not be the commercial juggernauts that they have become today. Had they broke up with OBSCURED, today Pink Floyd would be one of those cult bands that a lot of people haven't heard of, but that those who do know them find them very interesting.

And that is why DARK SIDE is their definitive album, and one of the biggest selling albums ever. It is here on DARK SIDE that Pink Floyd went from being beyond a cult band with some rather esoteric, rather impenetrable music, to being a very successful band with the same sonic identity, but more streamlined and much more accessible to the general pubic.

(As far s the whole Dark Side of the Rainbow phenomena goes, where Wizard of Oz and the album syncs, apparently it is unintentional, or so the band claims. Pretty bizaare how well they sync if indeed it is unintentional).