Pink Floyd - Animals: The Album Review

The (not) punk Pink Floyd album.

Roger Waters: vocals, bass, guitar, principle songwriter, tape loops

David Gilmour: vocals, guitar, keys, credited bass

Richard Wright: keys, organ, synths, percussion

Nick Mason: drums, percussion, tape loops

Author’s note: This post corresponds to the Animals episode of Vinyl Monday, originally posted 7/22/2024. Save for audio/editing jokes that cannot be included in a text format, this is a faithful adaptation of the review chapter. To watch the full episode, scroll to the bottom of this post or visit my YouTube channel here.

Going in: I love Pink Floyd. I love Pink Floyd. I fucking love Pink Floyd!

I was around for the mass reappraisal of Animals that came with the 2018 remix. Over the years, I’d only thrown Animals on my turntable a fraction of the times I’ve listened to the other 3 installments of Floyd’s golden run: Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and The Wall.

Wish You Were Here is my favorite Floyd album. I’m inextricably tied to its themes. I’ve lived that album. There was a period of like 3 months where I listened to The Wall at least once a day, I ride hard for The Wall. And Dark Side is simply one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Animals...just wasn’t there. I didn’t get the hype. It’s – no pun intended – a different beast. There was some hope woven into Dark Side. While Wish You Were Here was approaching the zenith Floyd’s mainstream power, it was also the beginning of their mostdoom-and-gloom period. The subject matter on their albums gets progressively darker until the darkest Floyd album (what I argue is the first Roger Waters solo album) The Final Cut. Wish You Were Here is dusk. Final Cut is midnight. Animals is in leaning towards the light, but you know there’s something lurking in them there trees.

This was Pink Floyd’s first album after laying their Syd Barrett trauma to rest. So how do they move forward?

First things first, the Animal Farm thing. I read Animal Farm in high school. Aside from sheep, dogs, and pigs being present, this thing bears hardly any resemblance to Animal Farm. The book is commentary on the then-extant Soviet Union, the album is a commentary on Western capitalism. Ergo, a lot of people miss the central theme of Animals.

It’s not just “society, man!!” (seven minute guitar solo with some pig noises) It’s “capitalism, man!!” (seven minute guitar solo with some pig noises)

There are some elements I still can’t get past. For one, the mix is whack. It’s not a walk in the park for a band to produce themselves. Floyd had a better grip on it than most other groups, but they didn’t have an Alan Parsons around for this thing and you can tell. This was amended with the 2018 mix. I won’t spend too much time on it since I don’t have it on vinyl and this is a vinyl channel. I will say it is very bright,especially on guitar phrasing. I really noticed the difference in the quiet bits; I hadn’t realized how whacked-out the fidelity of the original was until I compared both “Pigs On The Wing”s. I have to say the drums were a generally little too prominent for my taste. But if you’re a Nick Mason girlie congratulations for getting such a Nick-forward mix. I find he often gets lost in the shuffle.

Anyway, It’s pretty rich that Rog was out here bitching about The Man when he married into the British aristocracy. My brother in Christ, you are The Man.

What Floyd did best was collaboration. It’s what makes “Echoes” the best Pink Floyd song. Although yes, Rog was at the helm for Dark Side and Wish You Were Here, the guys could still build off each other and transform one thing into another and then another. Pink goes from green to blue to orange to violet and back again. By the time Animals sessions rolled around, the camaraderie wasn’t there anymore. Even before I did my research and found out about the guys building a whole new studio only to use it for this one album, I could feel the friction on this record.

On my first pass, side 1 made me feel angry. Not at the injustices of the world, pigs and dogs and all that. But at Pink Floyd for wasting my time. Never in my life have I felt this way after playing one side of an album, let alone a Floyd album! Rog’s statements were wishy-washy, anything meaningful he tried to say was mauled by the music. Ideas weren’t elaborated upon enough, and the song structure was slop.

Then I did something I don’t usually have the time to do. I carved out 128 extra minutes to do some homework. To better understand Animals’s musical DNA, I listened to Dark Side, Wish You Were Here, and Animals back-to-back-to-back. I needed to identify what elements were carried over from the first 2, what was left behind, and what was was brought forward as we go into The Wall.

After I did the extra credit, this is what I found.

Firstly, wow there are some really prominent callbacks to Animals on The Wall that I completely missed before!

Pigs On The Wing: I don’t have much to say about the first half of the song Rog split up to screw his bandmates over (you betcha there’s royalties drama woven into the Animals saga!) It’s nondescript as far as album openers from this era of Floyd go. Perhaps the weakest. There’s no grand overture, no perfectly orchestrated build. No plane crash either. Animals might’ve benefited from a sound collage. Instead we have a warning to the listener of what happens when we get lost in boredom, pain, and blame.

First we meet the Dogs of the world. Cunning, aggressive, self-destructive creatures. I gotta say, having a fade-in on a Floyd song of this era is unusual. Usually the guys crossfade from one musical moment to another. It augments my feeling that “Dogs” has a rough musical takeoff. The elements are there; Rog and Nick’s tasteful rhythm base layer, David at the forefront and a driving acoustic rhythm part, and Rick in the middle kicking ass all over the place with subtle flourishes and textural lines. But it doesn’t quite mesh together yet.

Dogs have all the social graces of kings, with nice handshakes making all the right moves. The wolf in sheep’s clothing. But just underneath the wool of their suits are savage animals. (She said the thing!!)

“You have to be trusted by the people you lie to, so when they turn their backs on you, you’ll get the chance to put the knife in”

I see these first verses as coming from the head of the pack. The old dog telling the young dog how it’s gonna be. You’re gonna chew people up and spit them out, step on whoever you have to to get by, and in the end it’s gonna mean nothing. You’ll be just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer from all the cigs you smoked in the office. (Remember, this is the 1970s. Smoking indoors is still a thing.) The echo effects on David Gilmour’s vocals and Rog’s maniacal laughing buried deep in the mix are super cool. Disorienting, like running from a pack of dogs in the woods in the dark. The cackles come from everywhere. Paranoia sets in as the dog’s dirty deeds are catching up to him. He no longer knows who to trust. The composition starts to come together when Rick gets to whip out some lead lines on the keys, but is once again disrupted by that iconic lick. It might even come into the fray prematurely. We snapped back the rubber band a little too soon.

Another attempt at takeoff is made after the first instrumental break, in which Rog introduces the next core motif. This round goes better. David really is the MVP of this song. He’s known for being an airy, fluid soloist. I love when he gets some grit in his style. In both vocal performance and his guitar work he infuses Dogs with its emotion; anger, resentment, desperation, the doom of “dragged down by the stone”(stone...stone…stone...stone…)

Note Rog’s tendency to start a sentence with “And…” when he’s in the writers chair. I instantly thought of Brain Damage: “And if your head explodes,” “And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear,” “And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes…”

Finally. 8 minutes in and things get good. Dark, desolate, immersive synthmania that Rick Wrightdeserved a writing credit for. And the manipulation of the dog bark sample with the vocoder? Genius. The thing about Nick’s drumming style is that you don’t notice how much he fills out a tune until he pulls back. Sparse kick, sparse snare, gradually filling it in with the cymbal punctuates this otherwise unstructured movement. Now the young dog has grown old himself and had an epiphany. The narrator POV switches to the dog himself: “Gotta admit that I’m a little bit confused, sometimes it seems to me as if I’m just being used” I haven’t seen many other critics point this out: the only group Rog makes an effort to humanize in this story are the dogs. Born in a house full of pain, fitted with collar and chain, given a pat on the back, a stranger at home, and finally our old man meets the same fate as Joe Keller and Willy in Death of a Salesman. You can’t help but feel for the guy. It’s cool that vocal duties were handed off as go from young dog to old dog. David’s got the softer, younger voice, Rog’s has always been a little harsher, thinner, rougher around the edges.

...might have something to do with all that inhale screaming.

But god, this verse is a clunker lyrics-wise: “Keep on pretending that everyone’s expendable, and no one has a real friend.” Really, Rog? You wrote Dark Side and this is the best you could come up with? Hey, at least it's better than the word salad "You Gotta Be Crazy" was. Seems we've picked out the olives.

Thankfully, the instrumental takes over, and finally all the kinks are ironed out. This absolutely weird and ugly...thing...mercilessly punts us into the resolution. That iconic lick makes much much more sense the last time around. The end of "Dogs" is bone-crushing. We had a rough takeoff there but well done boys, you stuck the landing.

Pigs (Three Different Ones): Musically, Pigs is my favorite of the bunch. It’s got the same smarmy swagger that Have A Cigar had. The greasy label exec was the pig of that story, now we get the pigs of this one. The gluttons, the slobs, the ones in this world who have fuck-you money. Pigs, 3 different ones: the CEO, the Iron Lady, and the puritanical pearl-clutcher.

My second-biggest qualm with “Pigs,” one of my problems with this whole album really, is the straight use of animal noises. It was cool when we forged and warped them in Dogs, and here too. But it’s just too on-the-nose otherwise. It makes me feel like the guys aren’t as confident in the album’s narrative as the fans are! My biggest issue...the talk box. My god. This is PEAK quirked-up white boy activity, not unlike a deranged Lindsey Buckingham doing push-ups on “Not That Funny.” But the talk box is literally one of the worst things to ever happen to rock-and-roll. It’s the wah-wah but without any of the charm. It’s grating, it’s self-indulgent, it’s Bon Jovi-ass nonsense that I will not stand for. Congratulations David for killing the vibe with that trifling mess.

Despite those blips in the equation, Floyd fires on all cylinders through “Pigs.” The bumps in the road are ground down, the guys are functioning as a unit again thank god. A pin-thin, razor-slash synth ping grants entry to the ominous synth loop. Whoever’s on bass right now (whether it’s David or Rog is hotly contested)makes fuller use of his fretboard than he has before, rhythm guitar scratches and darkly theatrical piano, indulgent full-keyboard swathes. Nick on a fat funky saunter. There’s a cowbell??

I wanna get drunk at karaoke night and kill the vibe by singing “Pigs.”

Rog makes a serious case for it. You can tell he got so into this one; flexing his theater kid chops with “whoo!”s and heavy breathing and sloshing through the slop. It’s utterly ridiculous. The final verse calls out Mary Whitehouse, a prominent and divisive British conservative figure in her time. All wound up in the moral panic of the 1970s, the perceived degradation of society and whatnot. “Pigs” is rounded out by my favorite musical moment on the record, with everyone driving full steam ahead through the muck. Whoever’sdoing an awesome cleaning up of the fretboard on bass, props to him. And David sets fire to the barn on guitar; but not without sneaking in his comfort riff. Every guitarist has one. Finally we have a crossfade on Animals! “Pigs” into “Sheep.” And, you guessed it, more barnyard noises.

Sheep: This song condemns those who lack critical thinking skills. Those who stick their heads in the sand, turn a blind eye to the real aggressors of the world. They fear the dogs though the dogs are too busy cannibalizing themselves to herd the sheep. It’s the way Rog chose to do this that intrigues me: “I have looked over Jordan, I have seen things are not what they seem.” Is the atheist getting biblical on us?

Yes, he is! I had to pull out the lyrics sheet for this one. But that heavily obscured vocoder bit is a twisted-up, Floydified Bible verse: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He makes me down to lie in pastures green…With bright knives He releaseth my soul, He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places He convertheth me to lamb cutlets”

This is dark. Laugh-out-loud funny in a seriously fucked-up way. How did Floyd not get flamed for this? It’s like if the twisted creations of The Wall associate Gerald Scarfe wrote the Psalms. And just get a load of this: “When cometh the day we lowly ones through quiet reflection and great dedication master the art of karate”

Musically Rick is the MVP of “Sheep;” playing it cool and doing a jazzy thing in the beginning. Unfortunately, this is another moment where the guys lose grip on their chemistry. There’s lots of incongruous elements and banging about. The sections of what once was “Raving and Drooling” don’t ever quite mesh together for me, and it fades out before any of these ideas are fully explored. Although I do really dig the reappearance of David’s “stone” vocal loop. It’s a cool tie-in to “Dogs,” and fits with their reappearance here.

Pigs On The Wing 2 was intended to be hopeful, but after we’ve had the wool ripped from over our eyes, I don’t totally trust “You know that I care what happens to you.” That aside, POTW might be the most important message of all right now. As you all know by now I am a dumb American. And this election cycle is gonna be gnarly no matter what. To the youngins in my audience, if this is your first election cycle as a voter than I am truly sorry you’re being subjected to this chaos right out of the gate. (It’s worth noting that the day before the original Animals episode went up, incumbent President Joe Biden dropped out of the race for re-election.)

But not all hope is lost. Because no matter how this thing goes, the best thing we can do is stick to our friends and our loved ones like glue and work on bettering our immediate community first. This is the same realization Floyd’s generation had in the mid-70s. When Animals was released it’d been 10 years since the optimistic, heady summer of love. Floyd’s career trajectory expertly articulated this generational loss of innocence and turning from the collective into the self. While still keeping an eye on what’s going on in the barn, of course. I think this is why zoomer Floyd fans like myself are so rabid; we are getting what they put down.

Roger Waters pushes my buttons. More so now, considering his whole crypto bro thing. He frustrates me to hell. And that’s why I dig his stuff. He may be a preachy egotistical megajerk. He may engage in needlessly petty bullshit with his ex-bandmates and their wives. He may have made the literal worst redux ever made. God I wish I had the time back in October to talk about how terrible Roger’s Dark Side is, it’s one of the worst albums I’ve ever heard. But Rog is clearly a very smart man with something to say; timeless statements that mean as much to me at age 13 as they do at age 25, and they’ll keep aging with me. I’ll be going on 28 when the inevitable 50th anniversary Animalsrerelease rolls around. I’d be willing to re-evaluate it then.

Rog comes up with high-concept stuff, from the music to the tours and everything in between. And damn, can he execute it. I may not like him as a person very much, but god do I respect him as an artist. It took some extra grease on the wheel, but in time the floating bits of the proverbial flaming pig have started to melt into something. David doesn’t consider Animals to be a creative apex for Pink Floyd and neither do I. The music isn’t as strong as it could be, but the performances share a fiery conviction; with David at the head of the pack for standout contributions. The compositions aren’t as organized as they could’ve been, I generally feel this needed more time in the oven. On this album, the guys are taking full advantage of moving out of Daddy EMI’s place for the first time. They pulled wacky sonic manipulations and layering in excess, much to love for the Rick girlies out there. The thematic content isn’t quite as fleshed out as it could be. Sometimes it lacks restraint. But Rog dips his toe into being a performer, voicing different characters. There are just as many lyrical stinkers as there are jaw-dropping gems.

I still don’t hold this album in as high regard as its brothers. But I see its merits. Artistically, creatively, and personally, this was an important point for Pink Floyd. Intentional or not, it ensured them a space in the radically changing musical future, however brief a time it would be. Animals wasn’t necessarily the album I wanted, but it was the album they needed.

Personal favorites: “Dogs,” “Pigs (Three Different Ones)”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!