Robert Wyatt
The Animals Film

Practically no one, looking around a bit, talks about what I consider (you'll forgive the heresy) the second best album by Robert Wyatt: The Animals Film from 1982. Soundtrack of the film of the same name, this brief tableau of suffering (28 minutes) is one of the most unique, sincere, and poignant records of the '80s. An industrial essay on agony. A social critique against experiments and slaughterhouse abuses on animals. The music that emerges is highly original and manages to touch emotional chords in a way I've never experienced before; the emerging emotions are not the usual standard four but are much deeper and more complex: the melodies (where present) in a melancholic-obsessive style (sometimes piano, sometimes soft synths, and sometimes Wyatt humming lullabies) alongside cold and ruthless industrial noises create an emotional contrast from which pure sadness mixed with unease (if not horror) emerges, along with a myriad of other nuances... a perfect reconstruction of physical and mental torment, something that brings tears. The record is as humble as it is eclectic.

The tracks have no titles, or rather, the title is the side number followed by the track number. The opening one is the only one that has a "song form" and a catchy theme (the dear old "wa wa" from Robert with his little voice), very classy. From this, you can already recognize the very personal style of the album, but it is from the second track that you truly enter a new world, a world of horrors, desolation, and, in the end, resignation: the first part of this is a simple "static" and depressed piano melody over a slow martial tempo supported only by drums (it's amazing how these two instruments alone, without any arrangement or special accompaniment, create such an intense atmosphere); the second part is based on a rough synthesizer, this time also with a syncopated melodic accompaniment; the third is an off-key flute with ultra-reverberated drums recreating industrial noises.

"1 - 3" begins with a synthesizer intent on organizing a "melody" only to then crumble spreading improbable sequences of notes accompanied by disordered drums and reverse effects that appear and vanish like quantum black holes, all immersed in an electro-genic accompaniment; halfway through the piece, the bass line enters powerfully, bringing order: thus, the drumming stabilizes from disordered to ordered (a 2/4 rhythm emerges), and a terrible and menacing slow and cadenced march comes to life, completed by an electronic sequencer; towards 3/4 of the piece here comes the piano schematically striking the rhythm with repetitive soulless notes, and... fade-out.

"1 - 4" is concrete music for synthesizers with "melodic" lines (so to speak) that occasionally emerge from the suffering electronic fluid.

To start off the second side there's "2 - 1", the most beautiful piece in my opinion, beginning: a synth in a light "wa-wa" style appears to wander in pain in the space-time vacuum represented by the timeless chords of the mellotron; a break in the second part that outlines torment: an extremely slow "via crucis" rhythm supports a fragile and poignant melody; another break in the beautiful (and fleeting) "third part", repeating the theme of "1 - 1" using a radioactive wind as the only instrument: everything stops, universal depression spreads, nothing remains but resignation and guilt... it's moving; the last break in the fourth part (kick drum, basic and repetitive piano line, keyboard carpet), mysterious and unsettling.

In the Dadaist piece "2 - 2" we find our singer's voice again, but this time it is not intoning a melody, but rather "croaking" annoyingly obsessive little screams of innocent persecuting souls.

The "2 - 3" is an annoying hiss over a boiling magma of electronics.

The last track begins with a soft synthesizer that gives a feeling of waiting, then moves into the most peaceful and least troubled area of the album, almost as if it wanted to describe the joy for the end of suffering, but with an underlying bitterness for death.

This is an album that certainly doesn't shine with technique, with an amateurish feel, but it says what it wants to say, how it wants to say it, with a researched and perfectly fitting sound. That's enough to celebrate it.