SIDE A
1. Pigs On The Wing (Part 1) – 1:24
2. Dogs – 17:04
SIDE B
3. Pigs (Three Different Ones) – 11:28
4. Sheep – 10:20
5. Pigs On The Wing (Part 2) – 1:24
Depending on who you’re talking about, Pink Floyd’s Animals is either an adored bonafide masterpiece as or more brilliant than any other of their multiple revered works, or something you haven’t really heard of. It feels wrong to call it an ‘underrated’ album. That applies more to many of their earlier (or perhaps even later) works. Animals is within the ‘big four’ albums that were huge successes and the peak of their work. Among the Pink Floyd fanbase it is every bit the equal of the other masterpieces. Countless such fans consider its one-of-a-kind aggressive attitude and sound to be the crispest peak of their recorded output. Its cover and the story behind it are equally as iconic, yet somehow, in general estimation, this album has always been dwarfed by the three epic tomes that surround it, which is a great shame.
The overall Pink Floyd journey is broadly well known and sure to be covered again later in the business end of this blog. From the Syd Barrett led psychedelic beginnings, the group meandered somewhat, releasing six up and down albums through the 1968 to 1972 sequence. A couple fall a bit short, a few are criminally underrated. 1971’s Meddle is the peak of this era, featuring the untouchable masterpiece Echoes. Then from 1973-1979 comes the ‘big four’, a sequence of massive smash hit albums to match all comers. 1973’s The Dark Side Of The Moon is the ultimate icon. 1975’s Wish You Were Here is maybe the most adored of all by the fans. 1979’s The Wall is more divisive but an unquestionably huge piece in the fabric of rock history. In the middle there came Animals, in 1977. When the whole Why? Pink Floyd? re-release program took place in the early 2010s, it included a trio of magnificent fancy boxsets called the Immersion Editions for those other three albums either side of Animals. It missed out on such treatment. Nothing summarises its status as a frustratingly underappreciated almost-icon better.
After two huge albums and a generally stressful low period, Pink Floyd entered 1976 one of the biggest bands in the world, touring one of the biggest and best shows in the world, but rather without material. As is so regular when an act achieves massive success and the associated pressures and whirlwind corporate rhythm, that band togetherness and raw creative spark was not there as it had been a few short years earlier. Roger Waters had two main epics that were ready to be recorded. Raving and Drooling and You Gotta Be Crazy had both missed out on Wish You Were Here but been played extensively live. They were the focus when recording began in April 1976 at the band’s newly purchased and converted church-hall-cum-recording studio at Brittania Row in London.
Meanwhile, perhaps more on reflection knowing how the future went rather than abundantly clear at the time, the band dynamics were irrevocably shifting. Waters had gone from primary lyricist to de facto band leader. Keyboardist Richard Wright was no longer making major relevant contributions for whatever reason, mostly personal and I suspect drug based. David Gilmour was able to naturally churn out superb guitar parts but admitted to being side-tracked by understandable focus on the birth of his first daughter Alice in 1976. This left Waters to carry the load and, though he liked to have his cake and eat it too by grumbling about this lack of contribution, he was certainly up for it. As the early lyrics to the two demos being worked on showed, Waters’ passion and fury about the nature of the world and its politics had grown and was beginning to seep into every element of his musical fabric.
The strange and cynical post-Vietnam times were proceeding in earnest. People had lived through Nixon and Watergate was fresh in the memory. In the UK, the 70s neoconservative movement was in full swing and Waters, understandably and typically, was particular aghast at the policies and characters of figures like Mary Whitehouse and Margaret Thatcher. Divisive as Pink Floyd’s future direction would be, Waters really had found his voice as a songwriter and activist of sorts. Eventually he devised a concept for the album, based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm except lampooning the evils of capitalism instead of communism. Whether the direction of the two existing tracks inspired this concept, or he came to it from some independent means, I don’t know. But either way, the lyrics and atmosphere of the pieces, even in that early form, did suit. Raving and Drooling evolved into Sheep, sardonically depicting the mindless masses of the working class and their eventual misguided but idealistic attempts at revolution. You Gotta Be Crazy became Dogs, the power-hungry money-hungry ravenous businessmen of the upper middle class. Waters added a third long-form piece, Pigs (Three Different Ones), the most biting and angry of all the tracks, lambasting the political class at the very top (specifically three contemptible examples of such).
The atmosphere of rage and darkness informing the album would prove quite self-destructive for Waters and band, but it also gives rise to its fantastic sound. This is inevitably Pink Floyd’s most aggressive album. The lyrics are bigger, angry and harrowing, but always captivating. But the instrumental sound benefits greatly from the atmosphere of aggression and anger. As his later Floyd and solo work attests to, Waters’ compositional style always tends to be quite raw and guitar-oriented compared to the more fluid spacy Wright-influenced sound of most of their previous work. Take that tendency, add Waters’ burning anger and the qualities Gilmour brings, and the result is a crisp, direct, guitar-oriented sound that represented a clear and exciting change for the band.
Sandwiching three epics, the album is bookended by the two brief separated parts of a strange but sweet little ditty, Pigs On The Wing. It is a simple love song dedicated to Waters’ new wife, featuring just the man himself on vocals and guitar. There’s not much to report on, but it is a perfect contrast to the heavy material of the rest of the album and helps give the album a satisfying structure.
Dogs takes up the rest of Side 1. It is the album’s densest darkest piece, always retaining a slightly withheld and withdrawn sense of discipline and tension as it unfurls towards an emotive finale over its 18 minutes. It is the only track on the album to feature a writing credit for Gilmour, and this totally adds up. It is an absolute odyssey of dynamic guitar work throughout, constantly shifting between precise acoustic folk work and huge sprawling rousing solos. It is the most guitar-oriented and dark sounding track on Pink Floyd’s most guitar-oriented and (to this point) darkest album.
Although its lyrics a somewhat abstract, the general tenor as per the album concept is sort of part ironic sarcastic instruction manual for how to be one of the ‘dogs’, part raw honest reflection of Waters’ contempt for such creatures. It talks about how it is important in the world of business to develop that ‘certain look in the eye and an easy smile’ so you’ll be ‘trusted by the people that you like to’. As the song develops it breaks down into a harrowing but unsympathetic reflection on how the kind of selfish money and power obsessed behaviour in the end leaves one sad and empty and alone, as much as or more than anyone else. That the nature of life and death is the great equaliser is Waters’ typically kind of morbid happy ending.
Musically, Dogs begins with a simple walking acoustic figure, establishing a folksy feel to the opening verses, before breaking into the first of Gilmour’s beautiful solo in the song’s first energetic rockout. Five minutes in, after this first workout, the music trails away, leaving only dark and distant sounds; Gilmour’s acoustic guitar, Wright’s keyboard padding, and the creepy processed barking of dogs. From this breakdown another instrumental section continues, based around Wright’s electric piano figure, over which Gilmour screeches through another far more aggressive screaming solo. Still on top of Wright’s chords, Gilmour gives way to a subtly frightening vocal harmony which builds to the iconic and very heavily fanbased memed ‘dragged down by the stone’ climax.
I’m always surprised that eight minutes have passed by this point, no doubt due to the combination of how captivating the song is, and its slower tempo. The long ambient middle section that begins now can at times feel the least interested, but it is still a sonic marvel. As so often when Pink Floyd get into this mode, it is dominated by all manner of astonishing Wright sounds, with great sparing drum work from Mason and more of the distant dog barks. This section transitions seamlessly into a recapitulation of the early sections, with another verse like the first over Gilmour’s returned acoustic guitar from the intro. This final conventional verse gives way to another rendition of the powerful first solo, before pausing for effect as we await the big finish. Those final two minutes in question are, though still dark, as rousing and powerful as Pink Floyd ever get. Another example of Waters’ brilliant and hard to define ability to climax with huge simple codas where he runs through a repetitive list style lyric, the finale features a huge harangued list vocal from Waters over huge Wright and Mason filling and a simple but grand climactic riff from Gilmour. It’s a track that always threaten true greatness, so constantly captivating but expertly tension building is it. The ending lets all this out and gives an the ultimate payoff that locks in Dogs as one of Pink Floyd’s true masterpieces.
Pigs (Three Different Ones) was the latest developed of the album’s three major pieces, and it shows. If Dogs is the darkest and densest, Pigs is the most outwardly aggressive, in sentiment and sound. It has the most subconscious influence from the increasingly dominant punk movement burgeoning as 1977 dawned. It is based around a series of simple aggressive distorted Gilmour riffs and an earthy Mason drum pattern with the cowbell turned right up. Waters sings with ironic sensuality about the three villainous figures (only Mary Whitehouse is namechecked directly), speaking of how their views and beliefs are so absurd as to be dismissed, they’re ‘nearly a laugh, but really a cry’, as unfortunately despite all that, these figures have a platform and power for those views.
Pigs has a simple structure. It opens with a quintessential arpeggiated Wright figure over which Gilmour fills the space with dexterous fretless bass work. From here comes the simple defining guitar figure and our first two verses. The centre of the track features a long jam where Gilmour’s solo features a primitive 70s talk box, on which he is trying, with mixed success, to mimic the squeal of pigs. Then we basically start again, with the same keyboard intro, same and even better astonishing fretless bass, and a final verse. As is a theme for this album, the ending is then a huge climax, as Gilmour unleashes a monstrous solo, sawing away in an aggressive fashion far beyond his usual languid melodic style.
The third and final of these epic dark tomes is Sheep, and although Dogs is the commonly acknowledged masterpiece, this may be my favourite of all on this album, and right near the top of the whole Floyd oeuvre. It opens with a rare jazz dive, for which Wright was wrongly denied a writing credit. He tinkles away largely unaccompanied early, playing a gorgeous jazzy solo on the electric piano, over which Gilmour is softly and eerily building a simple little staccato guitar riff that was the start point of the whole composition going back three years. After Mason’s perfect intro, the song suddenly goes nuts, unleashing into an amazing full-on rockout where that simple riff drives an impassioned Waters vocal and maybe Mason’s most dexterous and impressive career performance.
For the first half of the song Waters’ title Sheep are ‘harmlessly passing their time in the grassland away’, unaware of their lot in life. In one of the most astonishingly brilliant moments indicative of both the sonic and technical creativity of Pink Floyd, each of Waters’ vocal lines trails off slowly and seamlessly into a wright synth tone. Similar to Dogs, the bridge of the song features a slow restful but still slightly discomforting off-kilter section. At the end of this section, the sheep, represented by Waters’ processed spoken vocal, discover the injustice of their existence and commit to change, in an ironic and rarely humorous way, with a series of misquotes of bible Psalm 23. This gives way to the ultimate climax of this or really an album, as one more of the cacophonous verses crashes in and the Sheep rise up and revolt against the Dogs. Finally, everything gives way to the most supreme coda imaginable as Gilmour closes the journey with a triumphant final guitar repetition.
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