Animals Review

Recorded in the band's own studio in the year punk was busy calling them irrelevant, this is a much nastier record than the two before it and it has aged into the most durable of the late run. Dogs is seventeen minutes and carries the weight easily, an acoustic figure through a chorus effect, a middle section of processed barking and a closing list of what a life of climbing costs.

Pigs (Three Different Ones) has the best bass playing on any Floyd album and a talk box solo that still sounds vicious. Sheep turns Psalm 23 into a threat. Wrapping the whole thing in two halves of a ninety second love song is a deliberate joke that works. The reason it sits just below the peak is company: it is relentless, there is no Great Gig or title ballad to release the pressure, and you have to be in a particular mood to want forty minutes of contempt. When that mood arrives, nothing else will do.