Tiny Music...Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop

Tiny Music...Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop Review

"Orange crush mama, it's a laugh laugh laugh."

A rip at R.E.M., perhaps?

Nevermind. This is the best STP album and, like many of the other reviewers have said, one of THE underrated albums of the last decade. I got turned onto these dudes by my son, thirteen at the time Core came out, and this is first-rate rock and roll in an era when rock was dying a slow death after Kurt's freakout. Who knows why the critics crapped on this band so much. (My theory is that the story went around about "Pretty Penny" being an anti-abortion song, and you know how the tolerant Left deals with heresies like that one.) I guess you just need to shave your head, declare you're bisexual, and denounce the USA to garner the acclaim. Eff them. The Pilots may never wind up as background music in a TV commercial, but they truly rocked...and Tiny Music was as good as it got for them.

Tiny Music...Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop Overview

Grunge was the Stone Temple Pilots' stock-in-trade on their first two albums, but Tiny Music takes the group beyond such stylistic limitations. There's still plenty of grinding, metallic alt-rock here, thanks to "Pop's Love Suicide," "Big Bang Baby," and "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart." "Lady Picture Show" is a bracing blast of Beatlesesque pop, however, while "And So I Know" finds Weiland crooning over, of all things, cocktail jazz. The album's dozen tracks find the troubled singer musing (rather creepily) about the price of fame on "Adhesive" ("Sell more records if I'm dead... Hope it's sooner / Hope it's near corporate records' fiscal year"), and not apologizing for his bad behavior ("Tumble in the Rough" asserts, "I'm looking for a new stimulation"; bet you are, Scott). But they're rock stars, not role models, and Tiny Music is STP's edgiest, most accomplished effort. --Daniel Durchholz

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