Flippin' thru The Record Rack

I'll take Animals over The Wall any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

 

Animals is probably my favorite Floyd album, but I love The Wall too and have seen the movie more times than I can count.

Love The Final Cut and The Division Bell as well. Just one of those rare bands that never made anything bad.

 

I love the movie of The Wall. The album feels incomplete without the visuals to me now.

 

Top three Pink Floyd for me (in order):

The Division Bell
The Dark Side of the Moon
Wish You Were Here

Animals just doesn't do it for me.

 

Dark Side, WYWH, Final Cut for me.

 

Wish You Were Here, The Wall, and Meddle are my top 3.

 

From Allmusic review of Pink Floyd's Animals.:

Of all of the classic-era Pink Floyd albums, Animals is the strangest and darkest, a record that's hard to initially embrace yet winds up yielding as many rewards as its equally nihilistic successor, The Wall. ....
... Through it all, though, the utter blackness of Waters' spirit holds true, and since there are no vocal hooks or melodies, everything rests on the mood, the near-nihilistic lyrics, and Gilmour's guitar. These are the kinds of things that satisfy cultists, and it will reward their attention -- there's just no way in for casual listeners.​

 

Ive only done this once where I promptly returned an album to the record store (exchanged for trade-in credit). The album was Trout Mask Replica. I knew it was a complex album (like Animals) that might take time to appreciate. However, I was pretty sure one song was about celebrating a perverse infatuation or f'ing of an underage girl and so I couldn't stomach re-listens (i know they are not the only famous band to sing about imo pedophile shit). I wasn't sure if the lyrics were serious or not but the vocals were too difficult for me (like Opeth) because they were off-time with rest of instruments (supposedly intentional).

I tried a couple more Opeth albums. Clearly talented musicians and songwriting. I was able to listen all the way through the normalized Damnation (thanks @E_Schaaf ) but it didn't really connect with me but maybe like Animals apparently requires deeper study which is fine because Ive experienced that with plenty of albums (like many things in life) that I came to later love or appreciate.

 

Which song was that? "Orange Claw Hammer"?

 

Listening now and I think it was Ella Guru. However, I may have been mistaken about intent. There is a second vocal track thats says the offending lyric: “and she’s young too!” I now think the second vocals might be playing a character etc. Ill refrain from judgement until I hear the whole album again or do a little research.

 

The lyrics on "Ella Guru" are so brief that it's hard to say, but the single line "And she's young too!" doesn't necessarily indicate she is underage.

 

To me [now], it would indicate she is under 60.

Seriously dodgy song, albeit a rock classic: Good Morning Little Schoolgirl

/offtopic

 

I was going to say the same. The first time I heard the album was in my early twenties so when I heard these grizzly bastards say “she’s young too…” I thought it disgusting. But now that Im older the Beefheart lyric could be referring to a woman in their mid-late twenties which is now a young person to me. And Im still sure the hypothetical young woman referred to in the song would still grimace at Beefheart’s comments. But I think Beefheart is playing a character anyway so Im not too worried, like in Primus’ Tommy the Cat.

 

Yeah, Faith No More's Edge of the World is clearly about pedophilia. I don't take it to represent the actual views of the band though. Just being edgy - as many of their songs are.

 

Also in the context of Ella Guru, the focus is not on her age, but her other qualities, and the single line about her being young is either in jest (like, she’s got all these amazing qualities who cares if she’s young), or saying it’s just a bonus that she is a younger woman, depending on how you read it. Either way, it’s an aside, not the focus.

 

Anyway, I got confused with the Jefferson Airplane record that has a fish on the cover. Woof.

Which I've also forgotten.

 

@Philimon:



https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Beefhearts-Trout-Mask-Replica/dp/0826427812/

The album is, imho, worth a much deeper dive if you can spare the time.

 

I wish I could like, agree, and mark this epic all at once. Trout Mask Replica is one of the great works of art of the 20th century, IMO. And one of the few that we can freely engage with in high quality at home, as opposed to going to a museum.

 

It's funny to me to think that a band like Meshuggah can trace a direct lineage of almost all of their work back to this single album. Very concretely. There is little doubt, I have, that as you start to poke more around the edges of taste, ability, and sensibility in music, more often than not, you're finding TMR as a sort of tabula rasa for allowing those fringes to exist in popular music. "Crafting new sense from nonsense", to pull from my more nerdy philosophy drenched design graduate work/research.

 

And the things that make it challenging are all things that remain challenging to most audiences in 2023. Its impact hasn't diminished with time, familiarity, or influence.