ANIMALS

If you liked the Pink Floyd that displayed surrealty on Piper At The Gates of Dawn and Ummagumma, this is definitely not for you! However, if you can listen straight through any Tupac Shakur album and not get offended (albeit getting bored quickly), then you're bound to enjoy this album. The lyrical subject matter (modeled on the late George Orwell's Animal Farm) is very dark and subtle and must be taken with a grain of salt.

The album is bookended by a short but lovely folk song (performed by Roger Waters on an acoustic guitar) about a man who knows he can rescue his love interest from danger (the danger in question is "Pigs On The Wing").

The tone is set for the entire album. The "animals" on this recording are evil, cold-black- hearted people whose hearts don't pump "blood like yours and mine, but rather a thick, vomitous oil that oozes through their rotten veins and clots in their pea-sized brains which becomes the cause of their Naziesque patterns of violent behavior." (No disrespect intended to the creators of South Park.) So, basically, this album is an attack on these kind of people. When I was five years old, I thought the songs were written about dogs, pigs and sheep, but when I got older, I was shaken to know that Roger Waters was very bitter.

"Dogs," a 17-minute epic, deals with prisoners who must learn to obey their masters and deal with the outside world. There will be trouble if they don't. (For further listening on the similar subject matter, listen to the title track of Metallica's Master of Puppets.) The guitars (especially the acoustic ones) on this track are the main ingredient and David Gilmour plays them so well. The sound effects of dogs also add to the listening pleasure. (Interesting note: this song had a hilarious use in that old TV show WKRP In Cincinnati during the famous turkey incident episode. It happens where Mr. Carlson walks into the DJ booth while the song is playing and Johnny Fever rolls his eyes at Mr. Carlson's moves. Mr. Carlson gazes at the turntable and Johnny orders him, "Don't touch that!" Mr. Carlson is like, "Oh sorry! What's the name of this orchestra?" "It's Pink Floyd." "Oh. Is that Pink Floyd?" Then dogs start barking on the cut. "Do I hear dogs barking on that?" "I do." Then when Mr. Carlson picks up the jacket and looks at the back of it, he's like, "Pigs On The Wing? What's that like?" Johnny replies, "I don't do requests." Man, that was a hilarious moment.)

"Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is an extremely offensive song. Here, Roger Waters attacks society members and their behaviours, but most appallingly, a British woman named Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse was a candidate for smut-free TV and nothing with violence. Clearly, Roger did not approve of her beliefs and sure gave her a good pie in the face. This is a good, typical 70's rocker with some great piano. It also deserves credit for David Gilmour's guitar solo which he plays through a voicebox, making his guitar sound like a pig. The result is amazing since it actually works.

"Sheep" is an energetic track, but these lyrics are as insulting as the ones on the last track. Here, Roger puts down people of minorities as though they enjoy being lazy. The keyboards are the main ingredient in this recording. An anonymous Floyd roadie speaks through a Vocoder a parody of the passage from Psalm beginning with "the lord is my shepherd." In this case, though, what he says is something about fattening the sheep up and converting them to lamb cutlets. Make sure you never play this track around the religious unless they don't have wide hearing (but I'm an atheist, so I couldn't care less). The album ends with some great guitar playing that eventually fades out and seems like an almost perfect spot to end the album.

"Pigs On The Wing (part 2)" wraps up the album with the same lyrical subject matter and the loveliness of the first one.

This is one album that, despite the tracks' lengths, doesn't really take patience to get into and certainly ranks among their 10 best albums.

If I didn't rate this album with 5 stars, I'd be kidnapped by bounty hunters.

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