Customer Reviews
ALBUM 3 IN THE SERIES OF THE GREAT ALBUMS FROM FLOYD - By: Ben Faulkner, 10 Aug 2008 
What more could you want. I read once that this was the end of all Floyd as we know it. How wrong can you get! As I'm writing this I'm listening to it, & believe me when I tell you this album does not disappoint. Ok, it might not be as good as Dark Side, Wish You Were Here or The Wall, but itsin no way a bad record; & its on record where you really get the beauty of it. A cd is still good, but you don't have the raw-ness of the original format they released it to. Anyway the music: admittedly, looking at the lengths, dogs might be a little too long, & have an unnecessarily long bridge, but that's what Floyd are all about. Dogs just goes to show what a writing partnership of Gilmour/Waters can produce. And this being the only song on the album not written entirely by Waters, it also features less & less from keyboardist Rick Wright. He's still on the album, just with this album & The Wall, he became less involved. The open & closing folk rock ballads of Pigs On the Wing are really cool, & show just how good Waters was at writing. Side 2 features the bestin guitar on the album for me, as we get that ace guitar solo from Gilmour at the end of Pigs (Three Different Ones), & we have that insanely cool Outro guitar riff on Sheep. Each of these songs end with fading out, & they end with some of Gilmour's best guitar work, & you wonder why they didn't make Pigs On The Wing one song & the end the album with either Sheep's ending guitar riff, or put Pigs (Three Different Ones) at the end, & have Gilmour's solo end the album, personally I think that would have made it perfect, & that really is the only let down of the album. Basically its 5 stars coz its got brilliant vocals/lyrics/guitar lines/bass lines/keyboards/drums. What more could you want.
Ha ha charade we still are. - By: russell clarke, 16 Apr 2008 In 1977 when Pink Floyd released Animals they were considered by the punk movement so prevalent at the time to be one of the so called dinosaurs bands that the spiky snotty denizens of anarchy land wanted to supplant . The irony is, that Animals was as angry, biter & spiteful as any punk album & being Floyd it,s made with a damm sight more intelligence than most of those.
Animals is a concept album-something that would earn it even more withering scorn from punks. Inspired by George Orwell's "Animal Farm"in that is uses animals as metaphors for social groups - where Orwell was denouncing communism , Floyd ,andin particular Roger Waters , are lambasting capitalism . The animals represent various caste,sin civilised society. Pigs are ruthless leaders, their snouts trufflingin the trough, dogs are vicious amoral businessmen, while sheep are pliant followers- powerless & easily led.
Many of the songs for Animals were originally conceived at the same time as some of the material for "Wish You Were Here". The seventeen minute epic "Dogs" previously known as "You Gotta Be Crazy" & "Sheep" previously well known as "Raving And Drooling" are monumental pieces of music. "Dogs" is the one song on the album with a credit for David Gilmour & it,s accepted that this is the album where Roger Waters became the principle song-writer & where tensions within the band inexorably started to ratchet up.
The recording process for the album proved to be the last time that the band used their traditional approach of refining & adapting the songs live first before fleshing them outin the studio. From Animals on the band , or to be more accurate Waters. conceived the album then worked it outin the studio with some input from other band members.
The input from band members on Animals though minorin terms of song writing is vitalin terms of sound . Rick Wrights keyboard playing is pivotal to the music's sense of disenchantment & misanthropic anger. The way the notes fizzin on the back of each Waters verse linein "Sheep" is phenomenal. The whole album seethes with indignant intensity. "Pigs (Three Different Kinds)" villifies the moral minority , attacking Mary Whitehouse directly -"You house-proud town mouse ha ha charade you are"- but also lays into power crazed politicians ( It,s a veiled attack on Thatcher) & mendacious business men."Dogs" is an especially bitter piece where the greed & materialism of the protagonist does,nt prevent him from the vagaries of fate -"All alone & dying of cancer". The guitar playing here is truly exceptional , the instrument seemingly lamenting the passing of old fashioned values. God knows what it would do today....probably explodein shower of incandescent sparks.
"Sheep" is driven by an fabulous galloping Waters bassline & has the trusting followers wandering into a "Valley Of steel" before they turn gleefully on the dogs to "March cheerfully out of obscurity into a dream". Congruously the album is book ended by two sweet brief acoustic numbers ."Pigs On The Wing" Pts 1 & 2 are love songs written by Waters for his then wife Caroline, & seems to be giving the message thatin a world run by Pigs & Dogs love can conquer allin this case "Even a dog needs a home , shelter from pigs on the wing".
Animals like The Final Cut is an often ignored , sadly under rated Floyd album, though the number of reviewers who seem to agree with me is very heartening. I prefer this album to all their early albums & more than the album considered their classic -Dark Side Of The Moon , though that's great as well. It,s also , rather depressingly a more relevant album today than it wasin 1977 after Thatcherism & New Labour. Market forces rule the world - the dogs & the pigs are more powerful than ever & as for the sheep. Ha ha charade we are
The BEST Pink Floyd Record - By: Mr. M. A. Reed, 01 Jan 2008 My liking of The Floyd startedin 1989 with the Television Broadcast of the In Venice movie. Live, as it happened, & my brother recorded it on a old, battered VHS tape. On the dainty Long Play facility, so that now, some 15 years after, I've never been able to watch it or copy it since. For years, scraping by on pocket money, I never bothered with Animals or The Final Cut, reasoning that if The Floyddidn't play anything from it, it probably wasn't very good.
How wrong I was.
Animals is by no means an easy album : no collection of radio-friendly unit shifters here. But then again, genius is rarely easy either. Animals is undoubtedly the densest, darkest Floyd album there is.
For some, Animals has always been perceived, somewhat appropriately, the runt of the litter. : it was just another FloydCD box staring out of a rack (admittedly one that has a really cool picture on the front), another album where the songs never got played live or on the radio, & who wants 17 minute epics where you can sing to pretty songs like Wish You Were Here on the radio.
And I was one of those. It took me until 1999 to buy a copy of Animals. In the past few years it has been the Floyd album I return to the most, & for good reason. Even now I feel as if there is still more to be gained from listening to again - yet another layer of meaning to be unravelled from the complex lyrics & the inventive musicianships. And whilst some may say that Animals is the Floyd's simplest album,in terms of the bluntness of the lyrics, concept & music, one of the beauties of a democracy is that some have the right to be wrong.
Let us start with the cover.
Everyday, as I look out of my bedroom window, I see four white cannons reaching to the sky. I livein the shadow of perhaps the greatest symbol of human ambition, & human failure there is. The single largest piece of undeveloped inner-city real estatein the whole of Europe.
Battersea Power Station, now derelict, the ancient, rotting skeleton of the industrial revolution. On the cover to Animals,in its glory days, the station stands immobile, surrounded by trains, sheds, rail tracks. And a small, tiny pig hovering near one of the chimneys.
Mankind might create something of worthin this world. Man's ambition to conquer nature may prevail. But we're all Animals, even the ones that wear clothes. And pigs might fly.
Animals is the most under-rated Floyd albumin their body of work. Whereas the albums around it, the immensely popular Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here & the bloated The Wall, were all chock full of shorter, more palatable material, Animals, is a dense, difficult work, reprising the side-long 17 minute epics that characterised Meddle & Atom Heart Mother. There's little chance of ever hearing the splendour of the full version of "Dogs" on the radio, even if it weren't for the songs aggressively spiteful lyrics & barbed deconstruction of capitalism.
Lyrically & musically Animals is, unwittingly, very much a precursor to the punk revolution. At the time of its release Floyd looked to be just another dinosaur, another relic of the past that may very well be swept asidein the new wave. In some respects, the Floyd were everything that Punk was fighting against, &in the midst of this, they released their most obviously anti-establishment album : Animals is a damning indictment of capitalism, hypocrisy, & near enough everything & everybody.
Thematically, the album revolves around a sort of retelling of Orwell's Animal Farm, adrift as it is with Sheep & Dogs & Pigs (the three strata of society), & making clear the underlying themes of both texts : man is an animal who happens to wear shoes, & is as ruthless as any other animalin the wild. This theory is offset by Waters sweet love songs "Pigs On The Wing" - the one chink of lightin a resolutely grey sky - which serve both as relief from the unremitting nihilism & to reinforce the darkness of the rest of the set.
Following "Pigs On The Wing", comes "Dogs" : the centre point of the album, & baring the emotional resonance of an albumin itself. The song, which evolved from "You Gotta Be Crazy", premiered on the bands 1974 tour, was a long established staple of their live set by the time of release, & was the only Waters / Gilmour collaboration on the album. In fact "You Gotta Be Crazy" was probably the last time that the Floyd worked together as a cohesive unit, borne as it was from the same writing sessions that gave us "Wish You Were Here". But the song barely changed from its premiere performances to its final recordingin January 1977.
As a whole, "Dogs" is a long, hard song. 17 minutes of Waters spewing bile about humanity : a dog-eat-dog world of hardnosed predatory capitalism, probably best espousedin this lyric:
"Everyone's expendable, & no one has a real friend And it seems to you the thing to do would be to isolate the winner Everything's done under the sun And you believe at heart everyone's a killer"
In "Dogs", human beings - that is the majority of the population who enforce the Status Quo are presented as not particularly clever or informed, slightly vicious, & generally ignorant & fearful. Everyone's scared of showing weakness & being exploited by other around them, & the general mood of the song is ruthless paranoia. But "Dogs" is also,in my mind, Pink Floyd best song. The song, constructed out of dozens of small parts, constantly shiftsin style & stature from intimate to bombastic, & reveals a few excellent stylistic tricks : the bizarre moment where Waters vocals merge slowly & indistinguishably with an eerie synth linein the middle of the song is a moment that I still feel slightly uneasy listening to no matter how many times I listen to it. The other moment of uneasein "Dogs" is the masterful work of Gilmour, who transforms his guitar tones to resemble those of barking dogs, & braying sheep through some wonderful playing & inventive use of effects pedals.
Side Two - for those of us ancient enough to remember vinyl records - commences with "Pigs (Three Different Ones)". In Orwell's Animal Farm, the Pigs are the FatCats, the leaders, the privileged elite who livein a world of luxury, & the three verses of "Three Different Ones" deconstruct three different types of `Pig'. The verses take respectively, a fatcat businessmen endlessly chasing profit, a powercrazed political leader (modelled on Margaret Thatcher), & finally, a very specific attack upon Mary Whitehouse. Probably the most provincial & local of the targetsin Animals, Mary Whitehouse came to fame as a staunchly, overconservative campaigner for censorship of television & radio : the equivalent of a very grey, very wrinkled, very old Tipper Gore campaigning for "Parental Advisory" stickers on CD's. In their ways these three Pigs reinforce the Status Quoin different ways, being seen by Waters as equally problematic : The Pig of the first verse being the driver of big business, mercilessly exploiting anything & everything, the Pig of the second verse being the effectively-mindless reflexive politician chasing comfort & power, & the Pig of the third verse being that of repressed, scared, middle England who wants to live wilfullyin ignorance. Musically, "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is the least interesting song on the album, & one to which I still have difficulty remembering what the music goes like. That said, Thematically it works perfectlyin establishing & cementing the concept of the album, despite being relatively slight musically.
The final major song on the album is "Sheep". "Sheep" is another epic, also premiered on the bands 1974 Winter Tour, which acts as the final closing point of this narrative : In "Sheep" (originally titled "Raving And Drooling", as we all know), the music is a harsh pounding assault, reminding one of being under hot pursuit by Dogs, & lyrically seems to tie up the loose ends of the other two songs. What are the "Sheep" though? In some respects the Sheep of the song are what a particularly patronising politician may call The People. That is, the generally ignorant working/middle class who know only what the television feeds them, believe what they are told, buy what they are told, & follow the leader, as indicatedin this particularly telling couplet :
"Meek & obedient, you follow the leader Down well trodden corridors, into the valley of steel"
Further into the song, given the retelling of Psalm 23, acts as a warning. These sheep, We the People, are being lead to our slaughter by our own ignorance, like lambsin an abbatoir, it is only too late, when the truck enters the killing floor & the noise of sluices & grates is heard, that we realise, too late to act, that we are just meat fed into the grinder, like children being ground into sausagesin The Wall. Following the ritual slaughter of the Sheep, & thus, the collapse of societyin lyrical form caused by the untenable continuation of a rampant capitalist / consumerist society, there is nowhere else for "Sheep" to go. Mankind has amused itself to death. And Orwells vision has become flesh.
Following this, the final, swift reprise of "Pigs On The Wing". In one respect, this resurrects the initial hopeful conclusion, that somehow man can be saved from destruction through the healing power of love, but also provides sharp contrast to the sural & lyrical apocalypse around the album. It doesn't have to be like that, it says. Because someone can, & does care. And maybe, like John Lennon said, Love Is All You Need.
Animals is hard work : hard to sell, hard to digest, but my God, it rewards repeated listening. It's also easily the hardest of Floyd's albumsin another, less obvious way. Where as every record before - & after - Animals uses rock & blues as a template, Animals sounds & roars like a hard rock album. Like a beast. Take, if you will, the duelling guitars, the pounding bass & seemingly relentless drums of the climax of "Sheep" - never, not evenin "Run Like Hell", have Floyd sounded so aggressive, so uncompromising, so fierce.
Whereas each Floyd album rotates around a central theme or idea, Animals is the one that most clearly expresses that idea simply & clearly. Not for this album the convuluted, confusing plots of The Wall or The Final Cut, or the vagaries of Dark Side Of The Moon & Wish You Were Here but a simple & clear statement : Animals is a rock reshaping of Orwell's Animal Farm, equating all human behaviour to that of Animals.
Animals though, far more than any other Floyd album, is the one for whom there is the deepest affinity. One could be flippant & says it allows an old nihilist like me to vent his absolute disgust with human nature to a pleasing & unchallenging blues-rock soundtrack. On the other hand, one could say that it's a dark & damning statement about human nature & capitalism. But ultimately, Animals is the Floyd album to which I return the most, for me, it is the most satisfying, most complete of Floydrecords, & also the onein which I feel The Floyd were working at the height of their powers. Then again, when you livein the shadow of Battersea Power Station & see it every day on the train to work, I would say that, wouldn't I?
Floyd's Overlooked Classic - By: Tom Chase, 18 Nov 2007 I am firmlyin the camp of Pink Floyd fans who feel "Animals" is an unfairly overlooked masterpiece. It was the band's response to the evolving British society of 1977, enveloping the boom of punk, Rotten's "I Hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt & countless political & social divides. Roger Watersin typical style confronted his views head-on, creating parallels between society & the animal kingdom presentedin three grand pieces.
The pieces each represent a different aspect to Waters' animal theme, with pigs for greed, sheep for thoughtless following & dogs for unabashed selfishness. At times the lyrics become slightly derived & a little too obvious, but this is to be expected as Waters' vision for the album was not to confuse with subtlety - it is essentially a straight-edged, hard-hitting satire. The lyrical content is presented perfectlyin three classic & epic Floyd tracks. The first of which, "Dogs", is the band at their best, combining Gilmour's cutting & beautiful guitar motifs & solos, heartfelt vocals from Waters & a typically excellent atmospheric performance from Wright. The song is the essence of Floyd's progressive best, & has over the years become one of my favourite prog rock songs. "Pigs" fashions a catchy chorus hook, more brooding atmospherics & grand guitar antics. "Sheep" showcases the most energy, shifting the tempo up & galloping to its excellent climax. These three songs weighin at a hefty forty minutes, so patient & repeated listens will reward. The songs are bookended by "Pigs On The Wing", a lovely little two-part piece that finishes off one of Floyd's greatest achievements.
So underated... - By: G. Lewis, 10 Nov 2007 I have heard this album slated by many so-called 'Floyd' fans. So,in my mission to own every Pink Floyd album, I decided to give it a try. The first & last tracks are the only ones that are under 10 minutes long & open & close the album nicely. The highlight for me is the 17 minute wonder that is 'Dogs'. Brilliant lyrics & about 5 high quality guitar solos. Sheep is an excellent track & Pigs (Three Different Ones) is probably the weakest track on the album. Musically, it is half way between 'Wish You Where Here' & 'The Wall', so,in my opinion, you will get the best of both worlds!
