Stephen Thomas Erlewine (All Music Guide)

By condensing the sonic explorations of Meddle to actual songs and adding a lush, immaculate production to their trippiest instrumental sections, Pink Floyd inadvertently designed their commercial breakthrough with Dark Side of the Moon. The primary revelation of Dark Side of the Moon is what a little focus does for the band. Roger Waters wrote a series of songs about mundane, everyday details which aren't that impressive by themselves, but when given the sonic backdrop of Floyd's slow, atmospheric soundscapes and carefully placed sound effects, they achieve an emotional resonance. But what gives the album true power is the subtly textured music, which evolves from ponderous, neo-psychedelic art rock to jazz fusion and blues-rock before turning back to psychedelia. It's dense with detail, but leisurely paced, creating its own dark, haunting world. Pink Floyd may have better albums than Dark Side of the Moon, but no other record defines them quite as well as this one.

Genevieve Williams (Amazon.com)

Dark Side of the Moon, originally released in 1973, is one of those albums that is discovered anew by each generation of rock listeners. This complex, often psychedelic music works very well because Pink Floyd doesn't rush anything; the songs are mainly slow to mid-tempo, with attention paid throughout to musical texture and mood. The sound effects on songs like "On the Run," "Time" and especially "Money" (with sampled sounds of clinking coins and cash registers turned into rhythmic accompaniment) are impressive, especially when we remember that 1973 was before the advent of digital recording techniques. This is probably Pink Floyd's best-known work, and it's an excellent place to start if you're new to the band.

James Swift (Amazon.co.uk)

One of the most famous albums of all time, Dark Side Of The Moon sold 25 million copies in its first 25 years of release. It continues to be a favourite, with 20 per cent of those sales occurring in the period since it first came out on CD, a medium to which it is ideally suited, especially in its current carefully remastered form. Dark Side Of The Moon was the first album that Pink Floyd decided to break in live before attempting to record, with the debut performance of what they then called Eclipse just over a year before the final release date. When they finally retired to Abbey Road with top sound engineer Alan Parsons, state-of-the-art 16-track recording equipment and the new Dolby technology to hand, it was to produce one of the great pieces of studio art. Covering a range of styles, this was the last album (prior to Roger Waters' departure in the early 1980s) to whose writing the other members of Pink Floyd contributed significantly. Nevertheless, it remains a stunningly coherent package, bound together by surreal fragments of speech (mostly gleaned from asking questions of the doorman at the studio) and Waters' bold and bleak lyrics. Often reputed to be about former member Syd Barrett's decline into schizophrenia, in fact Waters has said the lyrics "were a lot about ordinariness" and dealt with people's responses to the increasing insanity of the pressures of everyday life. Some of the extraordinary sound effects used came from the most unlikely sources--the coins at the start of "Money" from Waters tossing handfuls of change into an industrial food-mixer that his wife, a potter, used to mix clay. Whatever the medium, a new standard for attention to detail and production values had been set and the world of studio recording would never be the same again.

Bill Wyman (Barnes & Noble)

No one was ready for DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. Released in 1973, the album signaled that the '60s were over for good, and that rock's search for mind expansion was moribund in the face of ever more intellectualized progressive rock (Emerson, Lake and Palmer), ever more arch art rock (Roxy Music), and ever more sensitive singer-songwriters (Jackson Browne). Into this breach stepped a veteran '60s band, whose one-time leader, Syd Barrett, had disappeared into a psychedelic haze some years before. DSOTM was Pink Floyd redux, largely under the decisive ascension of Roger Waters as the group's leading creative force. While the record was more of a team effort than later Floyd works, it put into play many of Waters's cognitive concerns: personal anomie, social frigidity, and facelessness. But unlike those later albums, DARK SIDE burns with hope and the sound of humanity. Maybe it's the spaciousness of the production (few groups have ever achieved the Floyd's reverberating vivacity) or the grounding touches (those massive Hammond swells, that saxophone). But there's also a hint of optimism in the band's everyman vocals, from the outraged consumer in "Money" to the beatific promise inherent in the closing suite of "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse."

(CD Universe)

Pink Floyd: David Gilmour (vocals, guitar, VCS3 synthesizer); Roger Waters (vocals, VCS3 synthesizer, bass, sound effects); Richard Wright (keyboards, VCS3 synthesizer, background vocals); Nick Mason (drums, percussion, sound effects).
Additional personnel: Clare Torry (vocals); Dick Parry (saxophone); Doris Troy, Leslie Duncan, Liza Strike, Barry St. John (background vocals).
Recorded at Abbey Road Studios, London, England between June 1972 & January 1973.

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON was a benchmark record. It turned the musical world on its ear with a hitherto unseen combination of sounds, and changed things considerably for Pink Floyd. For this project, Pink Floyd resurrected older and unfinished numbers, some of which came from the multitude of soundtracks the band members had previously worked on. The film "Zabriskie Point," a study of American materialism from a foreigner's perspective, provided "Us And Them" (originally titled "The Violence Sequence"). Waters rewrote "Breathe" after its appearance on his and avant-garde composer Ron Geesin's score for "The Body," a surreal medical documentary.
Floyd and their long-time engineer, Alan Parsons, used a multitude of sound effects--from stereophonically-projected footsteps and planes flying overhead ("On The Run") to a roomful of ringing clocks ("Time"). Further adding to the record's mystique, barely audible spoken passages were sprinkled throughout--a result of hours interviewing random Abbey Road occupants about their views on insanity, violence and death. Floyd must have struck a nerve; DARK SIDE OF THE MOON remained on Billboard's albums chart for an astounding fourteen years. It made Pink Floyd a household name, elevating them to the level of the Rolling Stones and The Who in the rock pantheon.

(Q Magazine)

Remarkably, it's 20 years, on March 8, since Pink Floyd hopped over the line of John Peel faves to become purveyors of a new spacy one-ness and finally ditch their primal Syd Barrett psychedelia. Prior to the release of Dark Side Of The Moon, both Atom Heart Mother and Meddle had hinted at Floyd's potential, but neither achieved this kind of massive global domination. Some 20 years later, just what was it that made Moon so different? It did contain the catchy but now infuriating Money, it captured the deadpan drone of the Harvest label's heyday and it does have the bedsit-friendly refracted light sleeve. More than that, it's hard to understand why this album did so much better than its predecessors. Now digitally remastered, Dark Side Of The Moon sounds solemn, pompous and proud. With a 28-page colour booklet and five colour prints - as was its format in the recently released Shine On box set - it's the perfect paternal present and offers a glimmer of excitement for any Orb fan.

Loyd Grossman (Rolling Stone, issue 135)

One of Britain's most successful and long lived avant-garde rock bands, Pink Floyd emerged relatively unsullied from the mire of mid-Sixties British psychedelic music as early experimenters with outer space concepts. Although that phase of the band's development was of short duration, Pink Floyd have from that time been the pop scene's preeminent techno-rockers: four musicians with a command of electronic instruments who wield an arsenal of sound effects with authority and finesse. While Pink Floyd's albums were hardly hot tickets in the shops, they began to attract an enormous following through their US tours. They have more recently developed a musical style capable of sustaining their dazzling and potentially overwhelming sonic wizardry.

The Dark Side of the Moon is Pink Floyd's ninth album and is a single extended piece rather than, a collection of songs. It seems to deal primarily with the fleetingness and depravity of human life, hardly the commonplace subject matter of rock. "Time" ("The time is gone the song is over"), "Money" ("Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie"). And "Us And Them" ("Forward he cried from the rear") might be viewed as the keys to understanding the meaning (if indeed there is any definite meaning) of The Dark Side of the Moon.

Even though this is a concept album, a number of the cuts can stand on their own. "Time" is a fine country-tinged rocker with a powerful guitar solo by David Gilmour and "Money" is broadly and satirically played with appropriately raunchy sax playing by Dick Parry, who also contributes a wonderfully-stated, breathy solo to "Us And Them." The non-vocal "On The Run" is a standout with footsteps racing from side to side successfully eluding any number of odd malevolent rumbles and explosions only to be killed off by the clock's ticking that leads into "Time." Throughout the album the band lays down a solid framework which they embellish with synthesizers, sound effects and spoken voice tapes. The sound is lush and multi-layered while remaining clear and well-structured.

There are a few weak spots. David Gilmour's vocals are sometimes weak and lackluster and "The Great Gig in the Sky" (which closes the first side) probably could have been shortened or dispensed with, but these are really minor quibbles. The Dark Side of the Moon is a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only invites, but demands involvement. There is a certain grandeur here that exceeds mere musical melodramatics and is rarely attempted in rock. The Dark Side of the Moon has flash-the true flash that comes from the excellence of a superb performance.

© Frank Steven Groen