50 years and not hearing them: “The Dark Side of The Moon” turns half a century old

When Pink Floyd went on the road in 1972 to present a sequence of songs joined together in a long suite entitled Eclipse, they certainly did not imagine that it would change their fate and that of rock forever. A year after the suite had been recorded, it had changed its name to «The Dark Side Of The Moon» and was packaged in a sleeve that was destined to become iconic. After a few months that album upsets the markets, selling more than any other album by the band, a resounding success and a climb that has never stopped, still today it is able to sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year.

Why all this? How was it possible that a single 45-minute piece divided into ten sections managed to have such an effect? An album between psychedelia and progressive rock, with a blues breath and various sound inventions in the field of electronics, which speaks of madness and alienation, music for the few, difficult, in many ways elitist which becomes a phenomenon destined to last 50 years and still far from running out, generation after generation. Someone in the past wrote that «The Dark Side Of The Moon» is the perfect album to make love, this is the main reason for its incredible success. Anything can be, and in fact the album knows how to become languid and caressing when needed, but we need to go further and understand that this work has its own particular magic that allows it to penetrate the soul of every person, from old nostalgics to young trappers, and never leave again.

The songs are all masterful, endowed with splendid melodies and impressive guitar parts, there is the electronic component provided by the VCS3 synthesizers, which, yesterday as today, strike the imagination as they are always new, even if in the meantime the music has made huge strides. But this is where it all started, modern pioneers cannot ignore Pink Floyd, this record. Even techno comes from here, if you listen closely even in the sounds and effects of the trap we can sometimes recognize certain Floydian inventions.