Looks like this’ll be the last song from Pink Floyd’s Animals that’ll be on here. But it also happens to be my favourite track on there. I’ve come to think of the record as the band’s almost, sort of reaction to punk at the time. Those gospel backing choirs and saxophones the group used on Dark Side and Wish You Were Here were done away with. The Floyd took a DIY approach to the making of Animals through building their own studio to record it in after leaving their usual work area of Abbey Road Studios. As a result, it’s truly an effort created and curated by the four members, even if Roger Waters will take credit for it all. And plus, there’s a lot of frustration and anger behind it all, which we can all do with sometimes. A lot of people are into ‘Dogs’. A lot of people are into ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’. And I swear, for a while, from what I saw, ‘Sheep’ was usually considered to be the weakest out of the three mammoth tracks that make up the meaty part of the album. Something that I couldn’t really understand. Because, in regards to listening to the entire LP, ‘Sheep’ is the track that the entire album has been building up towards.

‘Sheep’ had its origins from before the band even started work on Wish You Were Here a few years prior, as it was usually performed live under the name ‘Raving and Drooling’. Then Roger Waters was inspired by George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the lyrical content morphed into something completely different and now described a dire situation in which people were blindly following an ideology without thinking for themselves or willing to fight against it. Proceedings begin with the sound of sheep braying in a field, smooth chords on the Rhodes piano by Richard Wright and a bass riff that lingers on one note for the longest time. The three together make for a very ominous intro, made all the more so when the bass guitar finally slides down to a different key. Something big is about to go down. And it does, with the whole band entering and Roger Waters delivering a forceful vocal that seamlessly transitions into wild, freaky, spaced out note on the synthesizers. It’s a production trick that blew my mind when that happened the first time. Some genius stuff.

Once the band come in all together for that first verse, the whole track’s a juggernaut from that point forward. Roger Waters howling away on the vocals, while also taking on a rhythm guitar role (buried in the mix), with David Gilmour thrashing out these wild guitar chords. Nick Mason throws out these emphatic fills on the drumkit and Richard Wright fills the sound out with blaring Hammond organ chords. This is a band that’s locked in. It’s difficult for me to not just go through the song minute-by-minute and explain what happens here and there, that’s how quite strongly I feel about this track. This post may be one of my longest in a while. Sometimes you just have to leave it for someone to hear for themselves. But what I will say though, is that the outro to this song is quite possibly one of the greatest of all time. Like one comment on YouTube says, it’s the climax of the entire album. The way the whole track seems to rise in decibels when the cymbals crash and Gilmour’s monstrous descending guitar riff brings everything to a rapturous close as it eventually fades out. If there were musical definition for the words ‘glory’ or ‘freedom’, the two minutes of this song’s outro would be a fine contender.