• AllMyVinyl #17
• Band: Pink Floyd
• Album Title: Animals
• Release Date: 21 Jan 1977
• Date purchased: Original, N/A. Re-purchase 28 May 2020, Remix 3 Aug 2022
• Location purchased: Original unknown, Re-buy Tower Records, Remix Amazon
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 1
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

Today I’m covering what is in my opinion peak Pink Floyd – the 1977 album Animals.

I don’t know what I could realistically write about this that hasn’t been said before.  This is for me the peak of the merging of David Gilmour’s music and Roger Waters’ lyrics.  They hadn’t really split apart yet (that happened next album), but here we get to the zenith of what they both do.  Waters is way stronger with concepts and words and Gilmour is way stronger with music.  Oh sure they can both do the other to some extent, but when they do what they do best – and still work together, you get music like this.

Animals is an odd beast as an album.  It’s got a grand total of 5 songs on it, and two of them are 3 minutes combined.  The remaining three have lengths of 17:05, 11:26, & 10:19.  This is not an album for folks who just want to hear “Another Brick in the Wall Pt 2”, and that’s it.  This is one for those who get into their music, and let it drive for them.

I bought this album originally on vinyl back in the early 80’s somewhere.  That copy survived into 2024, and I ended up giving into my brother when I replaced it with a newer purchase in 2020 (as I thought the 80’s copy was long gone in 2020).   In 2020 I ordered a copy of the original mix of the album (the 2016 pressing), and that’s my standard go to version.   However, on 3 Aug 2022 I ordered the “Animals Remix” version, which is well.  the Animals album remixed.  This kind of release puzzles me.  there was nothing WRONG with the OG mix of the album, so why were they doing this, beyond a simple cash grab?  I get re-releases, Floyd excels at that.  I’ve bought several of them.  But beyond that, I’m not sure what the POINT of the remix was.  It doesn’t sound radically different – there’s a few different accents here and there.  The album artwork is revamped, but the music itself is’t TOO far off or changed, so I’m not entirely sure what the point of that was.  The original mix remains my preferred version.

I’m not getting into the songs here, because honestly if you’re reading this, you know Pink Floyd, and you should know the Animals album.  If you don’t, well, I’m not quite sure why you’re reading this.  ha.  There’s just so much to love here from Waters lyrics to Gilmour’s playing.  It’s some of Gilmour’s best playing for me – the guitar work is impeccable.

By the time I saw Pink Floyd live, Waters had left the group, and a Waterless Floyd wasn’t going to play this stuff, as the songs are all over 10 minutes long.  However, when I saw Waters in 2017, he had this awesome live setup, where at the start of the second half of the show, he built screens over top of the folks on the floor of the arena, and it was made to (initially) look like the Battersea power station that’s on the cover of the album art.  That was amazing as hell looking.  I got some video of it, embedded below.

Bottom line, this album is Pink Floyd perfection.  I’ve listened to it a ton of times in my life, and I’ll continue to do so until the day I’m not around anymore.  I don’t think I need to tell anyone reading his to go get a copy if you don’t have it, but on the off chance you don’t..  You really should go get this.  It’s amazing as hell.  In fact, I listened to both the OG mix and the 2018 remix back to back earlier today when I digested these albums again.

“… ha ha charade you are….”