Pink Floyd: Animals

Animals

Best song: Difficult choice, but I’ll pick Sheep.

Worst song: Not applicable.

Overall grade: 7

Round of applause, everyone, please. Pink Floyd become the first band on this website to achieve the great honour of having not one but two albums with a top grade of 7, something which won’t happen a lot, but here I just can’t help myself. This is also the first album I’ve reviewed that I refused to pick a worst song for, but we’ll get to that.

Somewhere between touring the ‘Wish You Were Here’ album and building Britannia Row studios, Roger Waters, now in full-on concept mode, came up with the idea for writing an album based around George Orwell’s novel ‘Animal Farm’. Then, he took a pair of songs that he’d worked on in sessions for the previous album, then known as ‘You Gotta Be Crazy’ and ‘Raving & Drooling’ and reworked them to fit the concept, turning them into what we now know as ‘Dogs’ and ‘Sheep’, so I guess it’s not really a surprise that this album sounds in some ways musically similar to ‘Wish You Were Here’. In other ways it doesn’t, though. Whereas on that album it felt like he was complaining and feeling sorry for himself from a distance, here he’s been influenced by the punk scene that’s just started to appear in the UK, and he’s angry and wants something to be done about these issues he’s writing about.

The opening and closing track to the album is ‘Pigs on the Wing’ (same melody each time, slightly different lyrics) and it adds both nothing and everything. I’d be shocked if it was anyone’s favourite track (either part) since it’s just basic acoustic guitar strumming and Roger singing a little love ditty to his girlfriend, but at the same time it’s what really takes the album to the next level for me. Without it, you’d just have three songs that use animal metaphors for types of people; with it you get a complete concept, and also a ray of hope in the otherwise-downbeat world of the album. It also adds a personal side, making the record feel like it’s about one guy’s experiences with all these types of people and the eventual realisation that no matter how much things might suck, he has this girl he loves to help him through, which is really quite touching.

The rest of side one is entirely taken up by ‘Dogs’. I’m just going to repeat what’s always said about this song and point out that it’s undoubtedly one if David Gilmour’s best vocal parts, ever – one of the first times where his hard-rock voice is really convincing, and he definitely shows us the ruthlessness of the ‘dogs’ he describes: I love when he sings the ‘you’ll get the chance to STICK THE KNIFE IN!’ line. Gilmour also plays slow, calculated solos which enhance the feeling of paranoia while drums march ominously in the background. I mean, it’s actually a fairly simple song if you think about it - but it’s damn good at hiding that fact. I don’t know what I respect more; a band with amazing technical proficiency, or a band that actually doesn’t play that well but makes it so you barely notice.

‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ follows, and it begins with that weird, spacey, piano melody, before a relaxing guitar part comes in, and gradually, the melody changes and a few more effects and instruments come in until SUDDENLY, it’s no longer mellow and gentle, it’s a full on foot-tapping funk song that completely denounces the old saying ‘you can’t dance to Pink Floyd’ even while it’s completely trashing various people in power (the identity of two of them remains unknown; the third is Mary Whitehouse, a name which doesn’t mean a whole lot to someone born in 1996.) Well, you can’t dance to the middle section so much, since it’s full of all kinds of weird sounds and guitars fed through machines to actually sound like pigs, but it’s still all really clever.

The easiest way of picking a best song on this album is to pull a name out of a hat, but maybe I’d put ‘Sheep’ twice in the hat to give it a better chance. After a quiet opening, the song becomes quiet chaotic, with a panicked vocal and a mess of instruments falling over each other, perfectly conveying the fear of the sheep; the loyal followers. (So, to recap: one slow and deliberate song, one fast and upbeat one, and one all-out crazy one. Great contrasting but complementary styles.) The echo of the ‘dragged down by a stone’ line and the chilling recital of the Lord’s prayer are inspired additions to an already perfect song. The darkness is lifted by a rousing electric guitar riff, also the song’s best hook, that begins a couple of minutes towards the end, as the sheep rise up to take on the dogs, proving that Roger Waters wasn’t always relentlessly cynical.

Then we have the reprise of ‘Pigs on the Wing’ to round things off in that simple but impossible to dislike way it does, and I hate it, but only because it means the album is coming to an end. I love it really. ‘And any fool knows a dog needs a home… a shelter from pigs on the wing’. It’s quite essential to bring things round full circle and tie everything together, and that’s why I absolutely can’t select a worst song for this album, because without any one song, it simply could not be a 7-rated album, or work as a cohesive piece at all.

Roger Waters, speculation says, is on the last leg of his massive Wall tour (which I am going to see in six days, hooray!) so as soon as that’s all over, I’ll begin thinking of ways to persuade him to take the entirety of this album out on tour. Maybe he can perform it at Battersea Power Station (as featured on the stunning cover) before they perform the criminal act they’re planning of turning it into an apartment complex.