Animals by Pink Floyd (2018 Surround Sound Remix) – Album Review

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New 5.1 mix places the listener in the middle of a dystopian farmyard.

Pink Floyd recorded Animals in 1976 and it was released early the following year. It sits uncomfortably in the band’s catalogue, preceded by the pristine, aching absences of Wish You Were Here and followed by the sprawling psychodrama of The Wall. The production is very different from other classic Pink Floyd albums recorded in the 1970s. The Dark Side of the Moon is warm, rich, multi-layered. Wish You Here is clean, sparse and still sounds contemporary. The Wall sounds luxuriant and epic, matching the album’s vast ambition and narrative sweep. In contrast, Animals is brutal and – by Pink Floyd’s standards – unvarnished.

So why is Animals, sonically so different from its peers? The band’s drummer Nick Mason, in his witty and revealing memoir Inside Out provides some clues. The band had just built its own studios at Britannia Row in North London. The walls were covered in lignacite, a breeze-block like material which efficiently absorbed sound but made the studio look, in Roger Waters’ words, like a ‘prison’. Mason says the studio, with its cramped control room had, ‘the grim and claustrophobic qualities of a nuclear bunker – although obviously much more stressful…’

The band had also abandoned the luxury of using a tape operator/expert engineer, hoping to bring a new immediacy to the recording process. Incidentally, when Mason and Waters engineered the recording of a guitar solo by David Gilmour they managed to erase it. The austere approach and atmosphere created, in Mason’s words, ‘a workman-like mood’ in the studio.

The simplicity of the mix was perhaps also influenced by external factors. Punk rock had launched a vicious but perhaps necessary assault on the excesses of prog rock. Pink Floyd, darlings of counter-culture in the 1960s were now seen as irrelevant dinosaurs. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols famously sported a Pink Floyd tee-shirt with the words ‘I hate ‘ scrawled with apparent venom above the band’s name (although he later admitted that this was more a piece of theatre than a statement of fact.) Pink Floyd’s response – perhaps unconscious – was to create an album that is as dark and cynical as anything that punk produced. Adopting the anthropomorphic satire of George Orwell’s 1945 novella Animal Farm, the album divides humankind into dogs, pigs and sheep. While Johnny Rotten claimed to be an anarchist, Waters created a dystopian view of society that was equally bleak. And while Rotten sang that the ‘The fascist regime…made [the Queen] a moron’, Waters addressed moral arbiter Mary Whitehouse as a ‘charade’ and a ‘house proud town mouse.’

It is perhaps strange that Animals hasn’t been released in a surround sound mix until now. Pink Floyd pioneered the use of surround sound in a live setting – according to Far Out magazine the world’s first ever surround sound concert was performed by the band in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in May 1967. (The band had a quadraphonic sound system which used the wonderfully-named Azimuth Co-ordinator, a kind of joystick, to send the sound flying around the audience’s heads). Eventually in 2018 Waters announced a surround sound mix of the album, which was further delayed until 2022 due to a dispute about the liner notes. Ironically, the 16-page booklet that comes with the DVD-audio of the album reviewed here doesn’t include liner notes.

As well as the 5.1 mix, the DVD includes the 2018 stereo remix, both by James Guthrie. It also features the original 1977 stereo mix by Brian Humphries. The remix strips back the original, making it at times even simpler. For instance on the two short Pigs on the Wing tracks that bookend the album, Waters’ vocals are much drier than on the original 1997 mix. This gives a greater sense of emotional intimacy to the only songs that provide an escape from the violent dystopia of the rest of the album.

The surround sound experience on the DVD is enhanced by the gorgeous photograph on the TV screen which updates the classic image from the original album cover, which looks like an Old Master oil painting perhaps from the Dutch School of the seventeenth century. It’s replaced by a luminous contemporary portrait of Battersea Power Station, which has recently re-opened as a shopping and leisure destination with new apartments. Cleverly, the lighting of the photograph gradually changes as the songs progress.

The longest track on the album is Dogs, the only one which is co-written by Gilmour with Waters, all the others being written by Waters alone. The first part of the song features one of Gilmour’s best vocal performance – raw, cynical, bleak. The surround sound mix places the main band either in front or sometimes at the sides. The mix builds on this solid platform and highlights the two double-guitar solos that appear in the rear speakers. But the visceral single guitar solo remains resolutely in front. The revelation here is Rick Wright’s keyboards – they appear in the rear speakers with a new clarity, or fly across the surround sound image. Their most imaginative use is in the extended instrumental section played as the protagonist is dragged down to his death by drowning. While Mason provides a measured rock beat, Wright’s keening keyboards provide anguished and mesmeric Tangerine Dream-like instrumental fireworks which are all the more effective for being isolated behind the listener. The track ends with Waters taking over vocal duties from Gilmour, with a repeated mantra beginning with the words ‘Who was…’ at the beginning of each line, almost a photographic negative of Eclipse the final track of The Dark Side of the Moon. The epic richness of the latter contrasts with the bitterness of the former track with Waters’ vocals so heavily compressed they leave the listener emotionally drained.

Pigs demonstrates the efficacy of the new surround sound mix – instruments are well separated, making them much clearer than in the original stereo mix. The guitar is now so well-defined that you can almost touch it, and the vocals feel much more intimate, particularly in the chorus. The sound world is unremittingly bleak; the synths as they drift downwards seem to provide a glimpse into the abyss. If there is a weakness in the track, it’s the extended instrumental section which is rather repetitive and lacking in musical interest, and now feels dated with its use of a vocoder. The track picks up again however with swirling keyboards which perhaps imitate the flying pig, and an almost funky third verse. Gilmour’s guitar solo is one of the simplest he has ever played, focused, anguished and less bluesy than his usual style.

The last long track on the album, Sheep begins with the listener in a field of those ruminant animals, soon joined by Wright’s gloriously luminous keyboards in the rear speakers. Waters provides a simple bassline and appropriately histrionic vocals which become dehumanised as they morph into synth parts. Gilmour’s guitar parts are brutally funky. The instrumental section marks a return of the drowning section from Dogs, with the ‘stone’ that drags down the dying man haunting the mix. A majestic synth duet leads to the ‘prayer’ section as the song drifts into a reverie of contemplation. The spoken prayer – much clearer now than in the original mix – is a vicious parody of Psalm 23 (‘The Lord is my shepherd…’). And while the sheep at first seem to accept that they will become ‘lamb cutlets’, it soon becomes clear that a time of quiet prayer – ‘quiet reflection, and great dedication’ – gives the humble sheep chance to rise up against the dogs. The sheep attack one of the dogs, ‘Bleating and babbling we fell on his neck with a scream’; the final word ‘scream’ is suitably terrifying in surround sound. The track ends with the death of the dogs, Gilmour’s shimmering and triumphant guitar giving the track an epic feeling of rock’n’roll celebration.

There’s a lot to admire in this new surround sound mix, which gives the album a new clarity and foregrounds many of the instrumental parts. The raw power of the album is undeniable. But perhaps it’s still a little difficult to love.

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