The Animals - The Complete Animals
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Music CD Cover Artist: The Animals Edition: Music CD Format: Extra tracks, Import CD Release Date: 1993-01-21 Music Label: EMI Australia Soundtracks: Music CD 1
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Free Music Notes for The Complete Animals Album
Free Music Review: One of the greatest cover bands in rock history
Hit: 5 Stars
First, ignore the oldest, 3-star review here. If this is a 3-star album, then so is BLONDE ON BLONDE. With just a couple of changes in the development of modern rock, the Animals might be considered one of the ten greatest bands of all time. It is hard today to realize how much the success of the Beatles changed music in general, and the British music scene in particular. In 1963, all the great British bands were cover bands; no band did songs of their own composition. The Beatles themselves, the Stones, The Animals, Manfred Mann, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, the Yardbirds, The Who, all were primarily cover bands. What did they cover? American music, mainly blues, Chuck Berry, R&B, Buddy Holly, some Elvis, and various odds and ends. But none of them were covering their own music. The Beatles, however, shook things up by performing songs that they wrong themselves. By 1964, more and more bands were relying on songs of their own composition. In 1965, and Bob Dylan's HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, the age of the cover band was over. You either wrote your own material, or you faded away. The history of early British rock can be told in terms of those bands in which a songwriter or writers emerged, and those in which one didn't. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger discovered that they could write, as did Pete Townshend, and Ray Davies of the Kinks. But the Animals, Manfred Mann, the Yardbirds, and John Mayall never developed songwriters, and faded from the scene. The Beatles changed the rules for rock and roll success. In 1963, the rule was that you were a great band if you were a great cover band. In 1965, you had to write your own stuff.
None of this should obscure the fact that The Animals were a flat out great band. True, they did virtually nothing but covers, but they were spectacular covers. All members of the band were superb, but the band centered around the incredible singing of Eric Burdon and the amazing keyboards of the legendary Alan Price. The diminutive Burdon possessed perhaps the finest British Invasion voice excluding Northern Ireland (i.e., Them's Van Morrison). His voice expressed a range of emotion and had a resonance that most of the other singers lacked. And unlike some performers who seemed almost to be doing parodies of the blues classics, Burdon sang them with an honesty and authenticity that is just astonishing. Musically, the Animals were driven far more by keyboards than by guitar, and Alan Price was the driving force in their sound. Switching between organ and piano, Price was without peer as a rock keyboardist until the advent of The Band and before the degradation of the organ by pretentious performers like Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson. No keyboard work in anything by Yes or ELP or ELO can even remotely match the simplicity, passion, and musicianship that one finds in the Animals finest songs.
The songs are great. Many, many American R&B songs from the 1950s, some blues numbers, and some marvelously judicious selections from recent (i.e., in 1964) songwriters, though their greatest hit was a reworking of Leadbelly's version of "The House of the Rising Sun."
There are many compilations of the Animals, but this one is definitely the one to get. Others have only the hits, but the great things about the Animals is that many of their less well known songs are nearly as good as "House of the Rising Sun," "It's My Life," "We Gotta Get Out of this Place," or "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood."
Note: In the Amazon listing, they have Disc 1 and Disc 2 reversed.