Animals Mississippi

Animals

Pink Floyd

Columbia Records, 1977

REVIEW BY: Benjamin Ray

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 07/19/2005

As the legendary Christopher Thelen said in our first Pink Floyd review during this retrospective, it's interesting to see how a band went from point A to Top of the Pops.

But two categories are just as interesting: how a band deals with stardom and how a band implodes. The latter category is the underlying theme during Animals, which saw Floyd go from cohesive and unified on Wish You Were Here to fractured and polarized on this release, just two years later.

This is the third straight Floyd album to move away from spacey themes and into firm Earthly territory. By this point, bassist and singer Roger Waters had taken control of the band, writing most of the songs and lyrics and shunning most anything keyboardist Rick Wright may have contributed. Musically, the songs are straight-up rock with winding repetitive instrumental passages, a lot of good guitar work from David Gilmour and almost nothing noteworthy from Wright except a few background sounds.

The concept is the best thing about this album. The lyrics are based a bit on George Orwell's book Animal Farm, and the three major pieces on the album separate humans into three categories -- "Dogs," "Pigs" and "Sheep." The other two songs here bookend the album and sound like Waters made them up on the spot, but since they are so short they're not worth mentioning.