Behind the album: Pink Floyd delivers a rocking allegory on ‘Animals’
Rattle off a list of the finest Pink Floyd albums, and you might pass over Animals, the group’s 1977 release. It doesn’t have any memorable radio hits, nor did it quite scale the sales heights of albums like Dark Side of the Moon before it and The Wall after it.
But Animals stands out as an important record in the band’s history, in part because it was the last time that they’d record as a quartet before infighting started to tear them apart. Let’s look back at one of the few Pink Floyd albums from the ‘70s to fall a bit under the radar.
Old Songs and a New Theme
After battling complacency and writer’s block following the massive success of Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd rose to the occasion with Wish You Were Here in 1975. While not quite the sales juggernaut that Dark Side had been, the album nonetheless proved the band could conceive of an overriding concept and make it all come together via memorable individual songs.
Throughout 1976, the band battered away at their next LP, doing so at their very own studio (Brittania Row) in London. That allowed the band to record at their own leisure, which somewhat accounts for the extended time it took to get the album done.
Yet oddly enough, they didn’t come up with a whole lot that was new, at least not in a musical sense. Two of the main musical pieces that made up the album that would become Animals were songs initially called “Kicking and Screaming” and “You’ve Got to Be Crazy.” The band had played them in concert as early as 1974.
What they needed was another concept to coalesce around them. That was the department of bassist Roger Waters. Waters had taken over the lyric-writing duties for the band on Dark Side of the Moon, and his ability to weave themes into Floyd’s atmospheric musical textures had proven to be a huge factor in their sudden success with that album.
Luckily, Waters saw some similarities in the lyrics to the songs the band were already working up. Another theme rose to the surface. Waters took different categories of people that he distinguished within society at that time and imagined them as different parts of the animal kingdom: pigs, dogs, and sheep. The pigs were a particularly rich vein for the band to explore, as it inspired the memorable flying pig album cover for Animals, which in turn led to the inflatable pig that became a fixture of the band’s concerts.
Animals Attraction
Why did Animals fail to make quite the same impact that some of the other Floyd records around that time achieved? One big reason was its structure. For the most part, the album is made up of three big slabs of music: “Dogs,” “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” and “Sheep.” All were over 10 minutes long, which meant they wouldn’t work with anything but the most progressive radio formats. No chance for a breakout hit single like “Money,” or even an FM radio staple like “Wish You Were Here.”
On top of that, the album is unrelentingly bleak from a lyrical sense. None of the three animal groups are portrayed in a flattering light by Waters’ lyrics. “Pigs” is the best section, but that’s mostly because the music is so dynamic and forceful, filled with David Gilmour’s crunching chords and Rick Wright’s swirling keyboards. Waters gives us a little bit of a break with the tender acoustic song “Pigs on the Wing,” which is split into two parts at the beginning and end of the album. Aside from that, it’s a dour listening experience.
On the bright side, it’s also a potent one. Floyd is a rock band that didn’t rock all that often. (Mostly, they sort of floated.) But on Animals, there is undeniable force behind these tracks. Perhaps that was due to the four men in the band blasting away in the studio together, something that wouldn’t happen in quite the same way again.
By the time Pink Floyd built The Wall in 1979, Rick Wright was no longer an official member of the group, and outside musicians were used liberally to realize Roger Waters’ concept. As a result, you can consider Animals to be both the first of its kind and the end of an era in the context of the Pink Floyd catalog.
