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Pink Floyd - Animals CD (album) cover

ANIMALS

Pink Floyd

 

Psychedelic/Space Rock

4.53 | 4094 ratings

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Proghead
Prog Reviewer
5 stars To me, I think "The Wall" is grossly overrated, but I think their previous album, "Animals" is much better. At this point, PINK FLOYD was obviously a household name. FM radio regularly played their stuff. They no longer had problems filling stadiums and arenas. For a followup to "Wish You Were Here", they had the balls to create no songs short enough to fit on the radio (except for the opening and closing acoustic pieces, "Pigs on the Wing" Part 1 and 2). While it's well known that when Waters started tightening the grip on the band, he started writing lyrics with basically an "I hate the world" theme (like on "The Wall"). Here he went for more a political bent, loosely basing the lyrics on George Orwell's Animal Farm, and being very highly critical of the political hierarcy, by giving certain groups of people names of "pigs" (greedy types), "dogs" (manipulative types), and "sheep" (mindless followers) in which the "sheep" eventually attack the "dogs" and "pigs".

Although some might like to think of this as their "punk rock" album, since it was 1977 and punk was the "new thing" in '77, to me, it's their last truly progressive album. For example, is "Dogs", at over 17 minutes long, you got yourself a lengthy, extended, adventurous number. I especially like the use of string synths and the sounds of dogs barking through a vocoder. "Sheep" has always been another favorite of mine. Many of the passages are quite reminescent of "Wish You Were Here", especially the synth solos. There's also a passage with the bass, synthesizers and some spoken vocoder dialog. "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" is also similar, but what's interesting is if you owned the cassette, they split the song in two, and it concludes on side two. The LP, on the other hand, has the song start on side two and no interruptions. Truly a great album, but my interest in PINK FLOYD stops here (as I hadn't been all that big on "The Wall", despite the immense popularity it has, not to mention being a fan favorite among many).

Proghead | 5/5 |

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