ANIMALS

Pink Floyd

Psychedelic/Space Rock

4.53 | 4103 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

ghost_of_morphy
Prog Reviewer

Hey, it's an interesting concept and we could talk about what dogs and sheep and pigs are 'til the cows come home, but I want to talk about the music.

This gets 4 stars, by the way, and it's really close to 5.

Animals and Wish You Were Here are cursed by being sandwiched in between two masterpieces, to wit, Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. WYWH seems to me to be largely an attempt at an FM friendly album. Pink Floyd discovered that they could write FM friendly music and still stay true to their sound on DSOTM, and WYWH looks back to that.

Animals is very different. Animals looks back to their older experimental, space rock days, with lots of extended passages of spacey riffs against a throbbing bass background. I love the older, space oriented Floyd, and it's wonderful to hear them returning to that, albeit with a new sense of style and taste that elevates the music to a higher level. At the same time, parts of this album really foreshadow what we can expect in The Wall. Gilmour's guitar licks, the catchier (but still Floyd) parts of songs that are actually songs, the general pessimism all look forward to what Floyd would be doing on the next album. If they changed the lyrics and cut out the space passages, nothing here would sound out of place on The Wall.

So it's a great album that looks back to Floyd's past and foreshadows Floyd future. Why doesn't it get 5 stars?

My answer to that is that the two elements aforementioned just don't quite gel together. Floyd tries really hard to make it work, but the space passages seem too long and the song passages seem to change the mood. This is noticeable on all three of the long songs. In addition, I just don't find Pigs as enjoyable as Dogs and Sheep.

So it's a great album that every prog fan would enjoy and it's a must have for anybody interested in Piink Floyd, but it just doesn't make it as high as the masterpiece level.

ghost_of_morphy | 4/5 | 2007-5-18

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