Pink Floyd
Animals

In stark contrast to '67, when love and peace were on everyone's lips, 1976 brought more hatred than anything else, hatred on all fronts. The musical field was well steeped in it, with filthy, rotten, hole-riddled and foul-smelling people, the punks, coming to the fore. They were sworn enemies of anything that was "well-constructed art": imagine, then, what Rotten, Vicious, and co. thought of our Pink Floyd, who had come out with the almost Bach-like "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" just two or three years earlier. In this climate of decidedly little détente, the beloved sound masters unleashed their most aggressive, hostile, and frightening album, the third piece of the trilogy on the squalor of the human condition: Animals. This no longer shies away from the central core by taking other paths, like the previous "wish you were here," but reaches the heart immediately, striking an arrow into the listener's heart, leaving them unsettled.

I don't think there is an album that better depicts the characteristics of the human race; the powerful, the sycophants, the ignored and blind masses. Pigs, dogs, and sheep; drawing on the expressive syntax of the great George Orwell in his "Animal Farm," Roger manages to leave an indelible mark on these characters, so well outlined in all their crystal-clear facets. As always, the cover has a fundamental importance in the album: it strongly recalls the two parts of “Pigs On the Wing”; a large pig flies ominously and forebodingly around the smokestacks of a peeling factory. Note the amusing fact that it is a superimposition of images: there was indeed a real inflatable pig flying over the Battersea Power Station, but the "real" one fell into a forest near Cambridge, not under control. Algie (the name of the real inflatable pig) met its end even before achieving its purpose.

The album is structured on three long tracks, one of which is unreleased and two ("dogs" and "sheep") already heard from the "Wish You Were Here" tour, with different titles and lyrics, namely “You’ve got to be Crazy” and “Raving and Drooling.” At both ends of the album, there are two small acoustic gems, highly poetic, which, for the first time in the group's history, speak of love. If we exclude the mad Bike from the times of "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn," indeed, there are few, very few love songs in Floyd's repertoire. Anyway, my main impression is that these two pearls were strategically positioned to "soften" the album's aggressive tones: a couple in love living their feelings away from the dirty mire of society, boastful and falsely friendly. After the brief introduction of "Pigs On The Wing (part 1)" we dive into the heart of the album with the splendid "Dogs." A fast screech of rhythm guitar drags us into an incredible range of powerful and distorted solos, unsettling howls, and typically "underworld" atmospheres, while Gilmour and Waters duet speaking of fierce, false people ready to stab their best friend for power.

"You gotta be able to pick out the easy meat / With your eyes closed / And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight / You gotta strike when the moment is right / Without thinking / And after a while, you can work on points for style / Like the club tie, and the firm handshake / A certain look in the eye and an easy smile."

But eventually, in these terrible people, servants of power, arises the doubt of having been used, but it's too late, they are too worn out, tired. They don't have the drive they once had, and their teeth are too blunt to rebel, leaving them only to die "dragged down by the stone" in an abyss of regret and confusion. The remnants of sound still linger in the shocked listener's headphones when a strange organ Hammond arpeggio in E minor is heard, interspersed with powerful beats of bass, guitar, and drums. It's "Pigs (three different ones)”: In Waters' imagination, pigs are the Masters with a capital "M," whose range of action is tremendously broad, not even remotely comparable to that of dogs, their sycophants: in this song, as can also be seen from the title, a quick (yet accurate) profile of Powerful people is given in every characteristic, strong, influential. The fat man, the pompous, falsely patriotic man, with a ruthless and murderous soul. Follows the old hunchbacked witch at the bus stop, whose voice is similar to the screeching of steel and whose power is certainly not to be underestimated. If the first two "profiles" give a "general" image of the type of person/pig, the third is real: Mary WhiteHouse was a very present woman in English politics of the time, famous for her intolerance towards art, she played as a censor, and to cleanse art of any political and social semblance. Since she was particularly fierce against the Floyds during "Dark Side" and "Wish You Were Here" times, Waters took revenge by making her the third and final example of a powerful pig.

The atmosphere calms down, and in the background, the moans of placid cows grazing are heard when Waters' voice returns to the dramatic tones already heard in previous songs: they are the sheep, petty and obtuse animals that accept the insults of the powerful and their sycophants: guys, we'd better convince ourselves that the danger is not real, that it's just an illusion of pessimists. However, the illusion cannot last forever, for once at least one sheep, tired of the game, exclaims: “What a surprise! A look of terminal shock in your eyes. Now things are really what they seem. No, this is no bad dream."

Tracklist Lyrics and Samples