have you run with the pack all your life ?
Yeah. I know it first broke in Year Zero. So fucking what ? No apologies. I keep insisting that punks are simply hippies with Sonny Barger inspired haircuts and attitude. Just so you know. Pay me no mind, but please do me a favour and keep that fucking dog on a leash. My son is wary - downright cagey even - and that makes me defensive.
No fear. And while I'm at it, may I add that Aleister Crowley was a silver spoon-fed charlatan of the worst possible pedigree. If I were a Sherpa I'd have cleaved his eggshell skull in tiny unhallowed pieces with a rusting climbing spike.
Written by Roger Waters & David Gilmour. Additional guitar by Snowy White. Recorded in the winter beginning November, 1976 at Brittania Row Studios, England.
▼ PINK FLOYD: DOGS from "Animals" LP (Harvest EMI) 1977 (UK)
Over on Art Decade, Mike has prepared for your listening pleasure a November 21/22, 1970 gig recorded at Montreux Casino, Montreux, Switzerland.
DOMESTIC ANIMALS REMASTERED
6 comments:
Ain't but one cure for hydrophobia...
Ha! I take it you refuse to confess the faintest degree admiration for this incarnation of the Floyd, then ?
Or are you referring to my line about keeping the dogs on a leash ?
I'll put my money on the former.
Well, it's a funny thing. I openly despised this album on release. It seemed the very definition those pricks punk engaged in kicking against. Turgid and overblown ; hopeless pompous and self-regarding.
In short, onanistic wank.
And yet.
Here I am, a little more than thirty years later, and it would be churlish - grossly hypocritical moreover - if I were to profess to still cleave to the dogma of old while secretly harbouring a grudging respect for this choice morsel of progressive tomfoolery.
I like this LP. There it is, I've finally admitted my shortcomings quite publicly. You may well accuse me of having slipped unconscionably into flaccid decrepitude. You may even be right.
"Animals", I think, is the last album of any merit the post-Barrett Pink Floyd would undertake. Sure, it's ridiculously grandiose in its intention to further conceptualize the basic premise of "Atom Heart Mother", but compare it to their next LP, "The Wall" and it holds its ground quite remarkably as a cornerstone of well produced restraint. The instrumentation and writing throughout is pleasant and noodly and perfectly in-keeping with the fashion for older farts of their day, and while its potential to succeed is admittedly clouded by its simplistic themes of man's inherent animal nature, it goes a fair way in maintaining the innocuous level of navel-gazing first perpetuated by "The Dark Side Of The Moon". I'm surprised to have found I've played this album in entirety on more occasions than i'd expect; I've caught myself tapping a foot wholly unconsciously while sipping a nicely beaded chilled beer or Pinot Blanc and fantasizing about "retiring to the South of France" with all the trappings of worldly success I've thus far somehow nakedly failed to obtain.
If you unwittingly hanker after some easy listening while chasing a tan on a private beach, you could do far worse. It's as close to a pleasantly indulged mid-life crisis as I'm ever liable to get.
Pure and simple.
Turning to "The wall" on the heels of those Waters fixated "Animals" was like being slapped in the face by the realization that the concept album of yesteryear would not only get much worse as the industry suits clamored to peddle the illusion of blockbusting narrative, but that the road into the '80s would be paved with dry ice and mind-numbing platitudes ultimately culminating in stadium skullduggery of Third Reich proportion.
Fuck that. If you're gonna take away any hope for revolution, at least give me back my inflatable pig.
If I get really sick of it I'll stick it with last year's safety-pin.
Oh, well, I was mostly just thinking that you sounded a little snarly and maddened... Had your blood angry'd up... and in my caffien-depleted state somehow got imagry of "Old Yeller", all rabid, typing out my fingers...
I enjoy some of the bloated pomposity what the 70s wrought, but... well, I guess I've gotten it out of my system, or perhaps it's just a fall-back, easy target to rip on... either or.
Shit! Ya mean I just spent the better part of a half hour trying to justify my liking this LP for no reason whatsoever???? That comment I just tapped out with one finger reads back like the humourless rant of a flunking high school student...
ah, well, ya gotta laugh!
You're right. I was sounding kind of ornery yesterday, but I can't even remember why today. I was probably just running off at the lip in expectation of being derided for posting even one track from "Animals".
Paranoid, moi ? Are these damn wolves laughing at me!!!
Oh jeepers... now I feel bad that you were amping up for an arguement (or at least some stridant defense) and I was so cream-puff on it. I can, when the mood strikes, rip into 70s Floyd, but I haven't felt the need, lately. I'm mellowing out nicely, I guess, but if you ever start up on the 'merits of the Eagles', watch out! My bitter-well waters might be becalmed, but there are some whorls that just won't settle.
Nah, don't feel bad about it. I thought it was really ironic and amusing that you were ambivalent about it to the point of total inertia, when I'd all too presumptuously whipped up this utterly senseless rambling defense. It made me feel vaguely like some hick lawyer who has embarked on a massively costly exercise in coaching a whole troop of witnesses and painstakingly preparing his evidence, only to waltz into court and find the charges have all been dropped!
Anyway, I decided I'd just build a post around the ridiculousness of the whole situation - since I badly needed to post something and hadn't prepared anything else - and then, when I finally got that set up as a draft, I found myself unable to post it after all since Blogger was running up against a series of internal server errors which prevented my uploading a damn thing...
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