Stone Temple Pilots

Tiny Music… Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop

RHINO Deluxe 21st-anniversary edition of their boldest album.

By the time they recorded their third album, Tiny Music, with producer Brendan O’Brien in a communal house in the tiny Southern California town of Santa Ynez, Stone Temple Pilots were making startling musical progress, held back only by singer Scott Weiland’s erratic behaviour. Art School Girl aside, they banished the secondgeneration grunge that was the core of Core and Purple (and to which they would misguidedly return on No.4). Instead they crafted something braver and more special, utilising a dizzying array of styles from psychedelia to country, via blues, glam and post-punk, all topped off by Weiland’s deep, rich croon.

Twenty one years later, And So I Know is still beautiful, Adhesive

remains the stickiest of rock anthems, while Ride The Cliché

shows there were few smarter acts to emerge from Nirvana’s coat-tails. There’s more included in this deluxe edition, of course: a sparkling MTV Florida live show from 1997 where Weiland is an especially gracious host and where his performance, not least on Plush and Sex Type Thing, shows why his bandmates were so reluctant to cut the cord. More intriguingly, there are 15 previously unreleased alternative/early versions of all tracks bar the instrumental

Daisy, which show just how expertly they built these remarkable songs. There’s even the inconsequential but previously unheard instrumental Kretz’s Acoustic Song, on which drummer Eric Kretz played everything.

Tiny Music remains the sound of a band with so much more to offer than Weiland’s appetite for self-destruction, and the additional material only adds to the picture.

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