Revisit:
Stone Temple Pilots
Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop
1996
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
Stone Temple Pilots: the Pearl Jam-shaped tumors (Core, 1992, and Purple, 1994) who quickly became the band that funds lead singer Scott Weiland’s drug addiction and court fees (No. 4, 1999), then who became irrelevant (Shangri-La Dee Da, 2001) and then broke off into a couple other embarrassing mid-Naughties nostalgia supergroups (Velvet Revolver, Army of Anyone) to cash in on Audioslave’s brief success before reforming and releasing a record that the Rolling Stones should have sued over (Stone Temple Pilots, 2009). Oh, and their original band name was Shirley Temple’s Pussy. Now we’re all up to speed.
Around Weiland’s first major arrest for buying crack came Tiny Music…Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop, one of those creative departure records that confuses casual listeners and enrages the fans. The package is distinctly of its times: nonsensical contemporaneous Lemonheads meets a Sgt. Pepper’s kind of alt-rock cover art, liner notes featuring a collage of random crap and photos of the band doing stuff. Grab a random Sponge CD and you’ll find the same exact thing.
For some reason Tiny Music… was one of my favorite albums as a teenager. I was not a teenager in 1996, so there’s really no excuse. Except that my sister gave it to me. In those pre-Garden State years all we had was mainstream rock radio, and so select segments of the country had no idea that the grunge movement was long dead and at some point alt-rock learned how to dress itself. I guess the fact that I preferred this weird, anomalous bit of pseudo-psychedelia over Papa Roach predicted a lot about my tastes when I’d later discover good music.
Musically the album’s delightfully poppy and varied, a far cry from the band’s breakthrough rape anthem “Sex Type Thing” and the one brief moment when nobody mistook them for Alice in Chains. Sometimes they get downright mellow on songs like “And So I Know” and instrumentals like “Press Play” and “Daisy.” “Lady Picture Show” holds up wonderfully and makes up for the apparent misogyny of the band’s debut single as a bit of psych-pop that’s only missing a harpsichord. The incredibly silly “Art School Girl” sounds a bit like it would have made a killer Dandy Warhols song.
“Trippin’ On a Hole in a Paper Heart” was one of the bigger singles from Tiny Music… as well as the one you still hear on the radio today. As such, it’s the one that doesn’t sound like it was made at anybody’s Satanic Majesties Request except for maybe Atlantic Records’. For a huge rock radio hit from a band on a major record label, the hilariously hypocritical chorus, “I’m not, I said I’m not myself/ I’m not dead and I’m not for sale” reads like sloganeering engineered to sell to Gen Xers.
The lyrics, however, are total fucking nonsense. They make Jim Morrison seem lucid. “Sippin’ lemon yellow booze/ ‘ole’ Leadbelly sings the blues“? “Booze, I can’t booze/ Steal your shoes so I can move“? “I gotta girlfriend, she goes to art school/ I got an art school girlfriend yeah“? “My friend Blue he runs the show/ With hot pink purple china glow“? “Wastin’ time chasin’ those cows that fly/ Churnin’ out all that butterfly sugarboost“? Scott Weiland’s been taking the wrong drugs.
Weirdly enough, the specter of Kurt Cobain is all over this record. It looks like the Nirvana frontman’s demise affected Scott Weiland in some death-obsessed “I’m also a self-destructive rock star, is this what I have to look forward to?” kind of way. So we have songs like “Pop’s Love Suicide” (“Oh I’m in love suicide/ About a pop star homicide“) and the moody “Adhesive” (“Sell more records if I’m dead/ Purple flowers once again“). In the midst of Weiland’s drug-addled lyricism, these bits stand out like brief moments of clarity.
Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop wasn’t really a change in direction so much as it was a quick detour, as the band soon returned to their usual heavy sounds. You can hear the band’s sonic interests in Tiny Music… show up occasionally in later Stone Temple Pilots songs like “Sour Girl,” one of the band’s better efforts. The lyrics are still terrible, though.
by Danny Djeljosevic
Key Tracks: Lady Picture Show, Art School Girl,
