Damn Animals with Pink Floyd is overrated!

Its a toss up between WYWH and Animals for Floyd's best album for me. I think I would go for the former as its feels like a proper ensemble album. Waters was beginning to take over the band when they got to Animals and Rick Wright's keyboards are becoming marginalised very apparently both creatively and production wise. I'm a  keyboard fan so that is a problem for me. Animals though has some of Gilmour's best playing. Dogs is exceptional of course.

All the songs are at the very least "very good."  The one gripe I have about animals is that it's almost overproduced, which is a departure from all the preceding Floyd albums.  Not as much to my taste.

Sheep is the best though

DSOTM offers a bit of relief in terms of humour in Money.  Animals, not so much.  Even where it's funny, there's always an edge to it.  

Dean wrote: Horizons wrote: Animals could never reach the greatness of Good Girl Gone Bad. Some say that Good Girl Gone Bad is loosely based upon Orwell's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and that Umbrellaellaella is a serious critique of corporate-media pigeonholing in a crypto-post-anarchic society, a theme that continues into Don't Stop The Music. It is rumoured that Rehab was a re-working of an older song called Cravin' and Dribblin'

Edited by Horizons - April 11 2014 at 11:17

By and large, I don't consider lyrics all that important to appreciating the music.  This is one of the cases where I think it is THE key to making sense of the album.  Without the lyrics, or rather the thoughts expressed through them, the album would probably fall flat.  I had not read Animal Farm at the time I listened to this album but maybe you need to do that first just to grasp the technique used by Waters here (otherwise they are very different works over and above the fact that one's a book and the other's a music album).  But you do have to be either a bit cynical or sensitive to the way otherwise perfectly nice people transform into predatory animals in the workplace or any other 'real world' competitive arena.  Waters has touched on all those things very nicely through the course of the album.  If you are the type who's so hung up on positivity as to steadfastly avoid anything that sounds cynical, Animals is not for you.

Edited by rogerthat - April 11 2014 at 11:05

Crumple wrote: I love Animals. Might be my favorite Floyd album. I'm not a huge early Floyd fan... ....

Rick Robson wrote:                <font face="Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">I think Waters was BY FAR  the best poet in the band. Maybe that's the reason why neither The Wall nor Animals are one of my fave ones, i was always kind of "lazy" to pay attention to that observations about our society in their lyrics, which at first seem somewhat depressive, imo, at least when listening to that PF songs. But in fact it could be very interesting for me to get the lyrics and give a good reading to them, in order to understand and get better their 70's british music spirit, which btw curiously differed in Genesis early 70's albums.

Genesis wrote songs that took the listener away from all the depressing stuff that surrounded them. It was escapism. Yes took that to new levels, essentially writing utter nonsense some of the time. imo

Floyd on the other hand embraced reality and very skilfully made entertaining music from very dark subject matter. DSOTM is very depressing, but it's also very compelling. Animals is angry AND depressing. A joyful combination, I think..

I love Dogs: it's one of my favorite Floyd pieces.

I think Waters was BY FAR  the best poet in the band. Maybe that's the reason why neither The Wall nor Animals are one of my fave ones, i was always kind of "lazy" to pay attention to that observations about our society in their lyrics, which at first seem somewhat depressive, imo, at least when listening to that PF songs. But in fact it could be very interesting for me to get the lyrics and give a good reading to them, in order to understand and get better their 70's british music spirit, which btw curiously differed in Genesis early 70's albums.

I wish you could see through our eyes and hear through our ears so you could understand why we hold this album in such high regard.  As it is, you've got your own eyes and ears, and hear things the way you hear them.  Nothing wrong about that.  Enjoy what thou may.