The Floyd-Hole: Every Pink Floyd Album - Part 10

 ANIMALS - REVIEW

Let's kick off with Pigs on the Wing Part 1 as a prelude - a soft and gentle (albeit fairly basic) acoustic guitar selection with minimalistic lyrics. It's brief, so there's not much to say beyond "pleasant enough".

Then we go straight into Dogs, a massive 17-minute track that opens with upbeat acoustic guitar strumming, heavy-hitting organ music, and intense singing - it's all pretty high-tempo for one of PF's "long songs", definitely catching my attention right away. Synthesizers roll in pretty organically to punctuate the backing music just before the song drops tempo into more of a soulful ballad, complete with long wailing electric guitar stings, and for some reason, a dog barking in the background (somewhat titular I guess). The guitar gets off-leash (pun intended, as it were) for a pretty bad-ass solo in the 6-minute mark. Afterwards the track takes a sort of heavy metal turn as the guitars amp up, and then ham-fistedly segues into something new over the backing of prolonged organ/synthesizer note sustains. The song gets "spacey" at the midway point, but the feeling is firmly grounded and somewhat marred by barking dog sound effects that feel a bit shoehorned in. When the spacey vibe melts away, it trails straight into that "newish" PF funk sound, with a slapping bassline, rolling drums, and echoed singing. Then, abruptly, it shifts tone back again to a slow metal ballad - this song is all over the place. One thing I will say for PF at this point: their sound engineering has really obfuscated the singing of the song, making it difficult for me to distinguish individual lyrics from the cacophony of guitar stings and organ chords (which is a shame, as I'm told PF lyrics are quite poignant for their time). The song comes to an end abruptly, but not unnaturally.

Next up is Pigs (Three Different Ones); admittedly the introduction with its catchy repeating organ chords and hard-strumming guitar sounds fairly different from what I've heard of PF so far, albeit crafted from the same ingredients. This feeling of newness dissolves once the singing kicks in, making things sound a little more same-y, but the cowbell is a nice distinctive touch I've never really noticed employed in a PF song before. This song has a funk-rock vibe throughout, being somehow both slow and fast simultaneously - a rare feat. The classic heavy-handed PF sound effects come in the obvious (for the track) form of pig grunting, but it's not intrusive and doesn't pull from the song the way the dog noises did earlier in the album. The latter half of the song is a fairly repetitive electric guitar backtrack punctuated with what I believe to be a "talk box" - a device that twists words into electronic noises; it's a nifty trick that does improve the song's somewhat sluggish middle bit. The singing gets intense, replete with heavy breathing and near-shouting punctuations. The electric guitar busts out a fabulous solo in the last minutes of the track, making for a very hard rocking finale that somehow fades into both farm noises and the next track seamlessly.

Speaking of the next track, Sheep begins as softly as the animal itself, with gentle organ music and sheep noises nearly putting me to sleep to a funk-derived melody. A strumming guitar and jarring, almost shouted lyrics wake me right back up though, as the track kicks into hard rock at 2-minutes in. At this point, the track sounds a bit like a party anthem: very hard-hitting and up-tempo, with a head-banging beat. The song dips up and down into "slow jam" territory a couple of times throughout, though it retains a strange sci-fi tonality thanks to some electronic effects and more (indecipherable) talk box sounds. Echoes and shouting give the latter-half of the track a disorienting quality, like a rock opera fever dream. A very loud, hard-rocking song by the end of it, but on the whole, this track has more ups and downs than a carnival strongman hammer game. The track is bookended with gentle noises, which best serves to contrast just how hard-rocking the actual song itself is.

The last track, Pigs on the Wing Part 2, is straight-up PF twee in the classic sense - gentle acoustic guitar strums, breathy singing, soft hippy lyrics. While pleasant, it's super brief, but I suppose that suits an album outro just fine.

Overall: Going in, I thought this album would be like the two before - best taken as one whole piece. I was wrong; these songs are capable of standing on their own, and are linked only through the shared theme of animals in the form of sound effects and some lyrical references. Of the past three albums (all considered some of PF's best "golden age" work), this one I feel is the weakest, as if made from scraps. It's less experimental, less memorable, and overall less impressive than either Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad album or anything... it's just not as strong an album as either. PF experimented a bit with some instruments (most notably the talk box), but on the whole this album felt like a very "safe" play, which regrettably detracts from it. It's still mostly better than their early stuff though, and you can tell by this point that PF has really gotten into their groove (perhaps a bit too much so, in this case).