ANIMALS

This album is very different from its predecessors. It is the FLOYD at their most violent, and there's much more guitar than synths through the songs, being less atmospheric and much heavier instead. Actually, 1977 was the year of Punk music, and this sure is the FLOYD's closest encounter with the Punk style, especially on the song "Sheep", so the violence of this album has some influence from the directions music was taking at that year. But the punks always hated prog bands and artists, tagging them as pretentious and boring. The FLOYD, though, didn't feel like making huge tons of simple noisy songs so they still maintained their progressive line, only with a more angry tone. It worked perfectly, and this album is one of the most different ones of the FLOYD catalogue, since they never reached such level of heaviness in their other works.

Here we unfortunately have the begining of Rick's loss of inspiration. He was having trouble with his marriage, and Roger was starting to take full control. The band was getting severely unstable. Dave and Roger passed ten years fighting for the album's royalties, and Nick and Rick were just playing their instruments and not writing anything. David Gilmour and Roger Waters were the two prime forces, one in charge of the amazing music found here and another writing the well crafted lyrics that aren't outdated by now and work even better nowadays. The concept is simple, since it is entirely based on George Orwell's book "Animal Farm", being not so original as the one from "The Wall". Actually, David's music is what really shines. Without him, this album wouldn't be half as great as it is. Roger's solo works proved that only long and creative lyrics with a bland music don't make justice to a song, so Animals features the most well accomplished combination of music and lyrics on a FLOYD album, losing only for WYWH.

About the songs, here we have two short acoustic pieces that serve to make the classic cyclic effect found in most FLOYD albums. "Pigs on the wing pts1 and 2" are both very pleasant and don't follow the album's overall tone of anger. "Dogs" is an excellent epic track featuring my favorite lyrics by Waters and some of the most delightful guitar work by David Gilmour. "Pigs, 3 different ones" has some very violent lyrics and an amazing intro. "Sheep" is my favorite song from this album, from the initial keyboards to the final guitar solo this song defines the word "brilliance" in its ten minutes.

Although this is one of my less listened FLOYD works, i have to admit its brilliance despite all the conflicts that were begining to rise between the band members. It's clear that Roger wanted a new direction for the band's music, and this would be completely accomplished on "The Wall", where his influence would be even stronger than here.