128. Dogs

Pink Floyd: Animals (Columbia, 1977);
composed by Roger Waters & David Gilmour

The greatest compliment I can pay to the vaunted “concepts” at work in Pink Floyd’s skadillion selling ‘70s albums is that you can ignore them altogether and at the same time they made the music what it was just by lending a kind of internal armature for what was basically an amorphous but still remarkably distinctive sound concept. The songwriting was neither here nor there after Syd Barrett checked out – and his tunes were pretty amorphous too, but they were concisely so. So although Roger Waters’s imprecations against rat-racing capitalist running dogs are no more acute than those in “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” contextualizing them resulted in this hilariously spooky haunted house music with cool guitar parts that holds up remarkably well for seventeen minutes solid. This track was fashioned from what was basically a leftover from the sessions for Wish You Were Here, which works better as a discrete unit than Animals does, in part because after months of flailing at a follow up to Dark Side of the Moon, they stumbled into a working method that worked even better. They got one more good album out of it, tailored to a collective aural identity, before Waters’s concepts took over.

Note: Secular essays about individual songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day through Advant and at least semi-regularly until Donald goes away.