Pink Floyd’s Animals, perhaps, should have been subtitled Careful with Those Axes, Messrs. Gilmour, Mason, Waters and Wright.
The audio equivalent of a ripped T-shirt embellished with either (take your pick!) “I love London” or “I hate Pink Floyd,” this album feels like a tattered souvenir safety pinned together with the slimmest of songs, “Pigs on the Wing Pts. 1 & 2,” which bookend and sightly juxtapose the intensity of the three epics, “Dogs,” “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” and “Sheep.” All of it paints a dystopian portrait of dark skies, black smoke, an unhealthy lust for greed, power, control, and anything else lyricist Roger Waters didn’t like way back then.
For the novice: Animals is Pink Floyd’s most aggressive record, a violent place-holding holler between the intense beauty of Wish You Were Here and the two disc big-show over-the-top creation known and loved by all as The Wall.
For the fans: Animals: 2018 Remix is a cornucopian bundle that includes the album now available on compact disc, a 180-gram heavyweight LP, Blu-Ray, and SACD with remixed 5.1 surround sound for the first time. And there’s new album art, which interestingly presents the Battersea Power Station under construction. That adds an odd sense of “a changing world” to the original cover portrait of that iconic structure, oozing with the (before-mentioned) dark skies, black smoke, an unhealthy lust for power, and anything else that Roger Waters probably still doesn’t like in the here and forever now.
Now, when compared to the previous Anniversary Edition, Animals: 2018 Remix does what has become the expected norm for these sadly non-audiophile ears: The sound is softer and less brittle with a nod to the vinyl sound. The sound effects linger here and there and increase their sinister sense of metaphoric bile. Various instruments like Gilmour’s acoustic guitar and Wright’s gentle piano rise from the “labyrinth of coral caves” and bubble to the surface – which still, even after all these years, finds “the albatross” as it “overhead, hangs motionless upon the air.”
Two ideas: First, this burned prog-rock fire in the midst of a late ’70s-era punk explosion. And also, the music can rightfully add a postscript addendum to any ripped T-shirt embellished with either (take your pick, once again!) “I love London” or “I hate Pink Floyd” with additional words that simply state, “Ha ha, charade you are!”
That said, Animals: 2018 Remix is a really big deal. And it is a reminder that those albums of the ’70s were, indeed, works of art that deserve our focused attention. You know, the vinyl resurgence really is a reaction against the Spotify short-term song convenience collection that allows music to become a vague background soundtrack to everything else in life.
To quote Bob Dylan, however, “the times they are a-changin’”: At my local store, the Music Box in Sheboygan, Wis., I played the role of bemused vinyl veteran of 50-plus years as a couple of college people extolled the virtues of “owning a real record,” and “playing it rover and rover again.” They didn’t mention the cool cover art, the magical mantric spinning grooves, and the inherent virtue of expanding our attention spans beyond the three minutes of the current fad single song. But that’s all there, too. Indeed, the art of the album is back — with all its patient revelations.
And that’s the gist of Pink Floyd’s Animals: 2018 Remix, in singular bits and pieces and a big deluxe-box form. All of it demands space as we “zig zag our way through the boredom and pain.” This is music that’s meant to spin and play over and over, as it provides a bit of “a shelter from” all those “pigs on the wing” – and, oddly enough, anyone who is not so careful with Eugene’s axe.
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