Stone Temple Pilots: Shangri-La Dee Da : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Hard to believe Stone Temple Pilots were once typecast as grunge wanna-be's. What's become clear after five albums - including their latest, Shangri-La Dee Da - is that this Southern California quartet isn't slavishly devoted to anyone's scene, let alone any one sound. Instead, STP albums often resemble glorified rock & roll jukeboxes, an approach perfected on the tuneful but disjointed 1999 release, No. 4, which evoked everyone from Jane's Addiction to (I kid you not) Rodgers and Hammerstein.

The span of moods and melodies on Shangri-La Dee Da is nearly as sprawling, but this time the lyrics take on a deeper tinge, and they give the album a weight and coherence lacking on previous STP releases. It's a fortunate development, because once again there's more than a bit of glam-rock artifice in Scott Weiland's vocals, as though he can't decide whether he wants to impersonate Jim Morrison, Cheap Trick's Robin Zander or Gordon Lightfoot.

Shangri-La Dee Da gives this vocal chameleon something more to do than just preen. An apt subtitle might have been "Detox Postmortem," the story of a battle-scarred survivor facing up to his responsibilities as a recovering addict (hung over and hung out to dry in "Dumb Love") and family man (the love-struck dad in "A Song for Sleeping"). Not that anyone should conclude that Weiland has suddenly gone all humble on us; there's more than a glimmer of the old self- destructive bravado amid the cautionary tales in "Too Cool Queenie" and "Hollywood Bitch." The remaining members of STP continue to live large. Dean DeLeo's chords land like ten-ton bombs amid the enormo-grooves of bassist Robert DeLeo and drummer Eric Kretz on "Long Way Home" and "Transmissions From a Lonely Room." He spins a psychedelic pinwheel on "Regeneration"; on "Coma," Weiland's voice mimics a scratching guitar. Underneath the bombast, a concise tunefulness prevails - even the middle eights of these songs boast a singalong immediacy. Shangri-La Dee Da may be the most soul-searching album STP have ever done, but it still roars like a jukebox on a Saturday night.