Pink Floyd- Animals

Time for yet another wonderful Floyd album. After Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd were on top of their game. Popular the world over, they had great expectations for their 10th album, Animals, released in 1977. At this point, Roger Waters was really starting to take control of the band, their artistic vision becoming his artistic vision. This is the last album where Gilmour, Mason, and Wright had much of anything to do until Waters left. Despite this shift, Animals still packs that massive Pink Floyd punch of Prog splendor. The album is another one of Floyd's good old concept albums, this time a take on George Orwell's Animal Farm with an emphasis on isolation (the overarching theme of all of Pink Floyd's work.) This is also by hard Floyd's hardest album as far as the style goes, especially Gilmour's guitar.

We kick off the album with "Pigs on the Wing, Pt. 1", a 1:25 acoustic little love ballad. It's not bad, but a bit non sequiteur and forgettable compared to what follows. The guitar then leads into "Dogs", who are business-like people willing to sacrifice anyone around them to make personal gain. The lyrics criticise these people for being emotionally devoid and soulless, only to get "dragged down by the stone". This piece is all about Gilmour, who sings most of the vocals, plays the best guitar performance of Floyd's career with hard rock solos to die for, and just seems to command the flow. The others all add in nice little touches to make the song seem straight from distopia. There's lots of distortion of the keyboards to contribute a grittiness to the song. "Dogs" lasts 17 minutes, so the record then flips.

Next up we have "Pigs", who are the moral police. These people try to edit society not by destroying, but by molding it to suit their needs (like politicians, censors, jet setters). This one has more bass guitar which gives it as certain bounce, like a battle. The guitars and drums add to the frey to produce lots of force to back up the attack on the pigs, who are "nearly a treat, but really a cry". Ha ha, charade they are indeed. For the final animal, we've got "Sheep." Rather than attacking them, Waters more mocks them for being the followers who just go along with whatever society tells them, and get slaughtered by dogs as resources. This one is chilling, using a scream-into synthesizer effect, crazy guitar, and thick beat, all in contrast with a lush keyboard opening. In the end the sheep revolt, and if the music is supposed to represent what they had to go through, I can't blame them. "Pigs on the Wing Pt. 2" closes the album the exact same way that Pt. 1 opened.

This is defiantly a change in direction for Pink Floyd. Animals alludes to Orwell's work but does not tie itself to it in such a way as that the interpretation is similar. Rather than being anti-communist, this album is anti-capitalist if anything due to the heavy attacks on The Dogs as ruthless extortionists and the Sheep as hapless consumers. Overall, I think that this one supplements the themes on Dark Side and Wish, and rather than concentrating on the isolation of individuals from other individuals, Animals looks at isolation of different segments of society from each other. Back up all that existential depth with some kick as instrumentation, and we've got ourselves one hell of an album.

While it's farther from the progressive mold than many albums on this blog, Animals manages to trump them in terms of musical might. Grade: A+