[ad_1]
Pink Floyd’s The Darkish Facet of the Moon turned 50 earlier this 12 months, which maybe makes it appear simple to dismiss as an artifact of a bygone period. It belongs to a interval in fashionable music historical past when musicians and bands had been approaching their albums with ever-greater aesthetic and mental ambitions — what I’ve come to name the medium’s “heroic age” — whose merchandise can strike twenty-first-century listeners as extreme, pretentious, and even unhinged. However despite the atmosphere of dorm-room THC haze that has lengthy hung round it, The Darkish Facet of the Moon stays related at present, dealing because it does with such everlasting themes as youth, alternative, mortality, and insanity — to say nothing of time and cash.
That’s how Polyphonic creator Noah Lefevre frames it in the video above, an hour-long track-by-track evaluation of the Floyd’s best-known album. It’s really a compilation of all eight episodes of a collection initially launched in 2020, which, very like The Darkish Facet of the Moon Itself, advantages from being skilled not in elements however as an entire.
Lefevre describes the album as “concerning the stresses and struggles that make human existence what it’s. It’s about all of the noise that consistently surrounds us, and about making an attempt to chop via that noise to search out fact, magnificence, and which means.” He additionally quotes Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters ascribing to it the assertion that “all the nice issues life can supply are there for us to know, however that the affect of some darkish pressure in our natures prevents us from seizing them.”
The Darkish Facet of the Moon has endured not simply by coping with these themes, but additionally by doing so with a cinematic sonic richness. That owes a lot to the work of Alan Parsons, who engineered the recording, however a lot of the album’s lengthy conception occurred exterior the studio. “It began out with just a few weeks in a rehearsal house throughout which Pink Floyd wrote a tough define for the piece,” says Lefevre. “Then the band took that on tour, despite the fact that it was removed from completion. They carried out sixteen dates within the UK, enjoying the album in full every evening”; all of the whereas, they “labored via the album, fine-tuning it and growing it.” This explains why the end result — which, like all of Pink Floyd’s albums, you possibly can hear free on Youtube — sounds painstakingly produced but natural. Give The Darkish Facet of the Moon one other pay attention at present, and also you’ll perceive why it’s persevered just like the situation of contemporary life itself.
Associated content material:
Pink Floyd’s Whole Studio Discography is Now on YouTube: Stream the Studio & Reside Albums
Obtain Pink Floyd’s 1975 Comedian Guide Program for The Darkish Facet of the Moon Tour
A Reside Studio Cowl of Pink Floyd’s The Darkish Facet of the Moon, Performed from Begin to End
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embrace the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the guide The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Observe him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Fb.
[ad_2]