Damn Animals with Pink Floyd is overrated!

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

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

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.  

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

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.

Dean wrote: Aminals presaged 80s Stadium Rock, all it lacked was power ballads, sing-a-long choruses and an over-abundance of Spandex™ It did however, have a pig.

Notwithstanding the figure hugging porcine strides, surely any subsequent stadium rock that didn't have power ballads and sing a long choruses would be deemed an abject failure? (Do you mean the visual extravagance of the live shows that Floyd put on presaged the scale of stadium rock etc?)

ExittheLemming wrote: Notwithstanding the figure hugging porcine strides, surely any subsequent stadium rock that didn't have power ballads and sing a long choruses would be deemed an abject failure? (Do you mean the visual extravagance of the live shows that Floyd put on presaged the scale of stadium rock etc?)

Dean:  That's intriguing.  Any specific stadium rock songs you are thinking of that resemble Animals?  I would have thought WYWH (the song) had more stadium rock potential than anything on Animals.

rogerthat wrote: Dean:  That's intriguing.  Any specific stadium rock songs you are thinking of that resemble Animals?  I would have thought WYWH (the song) had more stadium rock potential than anything on Animals.

Edited by Dean - April 12 2014 at 05:18

The guitar tone on this album, especially on Sheep, has that big heavy metal feel though the riffs are not actually all that metal-like.