Stone Temple Pilots – No. 4

Artist: Stone Temple Pilots

Title: No. 4

Label: Atlantic

Rating: 6.5/10

If you liked Stone Temple Pilots when they first made waves with “Plush”, you will enjoy this record. It seems that the albums between their first, Core, and their latest, No. 4, have been known more for their ballads than their aggression. Well, smile, those roaring guitars that you missed are back. Scott Weiland is also back and hasn’t sounded this dark since “Dead And Bloated”.

“Down” kicks your ass right away. “Heaven & Hot Rods” sounds like a silly name but it’s quite a fitting title, a little good mixed with more bad. “Church On Tuesday” combines balladeer with booming guitar licks, but the chorus falls off in comparison to the nice sounding verse. The full-fledged ballad comes from “Sour Girl”. Though “Sour Girl” is not on the level that “Creep” was, it’s still a honey-tinged lozenge that goes down smoothly.

Don’t worry that you are going to get bogged down with ballads. The next track, “No Way Out”, provides the crunch that you want from the originally heavy Stone Temple Pilots. “Sex & Violence” was nothing but a letdown. “I Got You” is a pretty dreary track: “I got you/ to paint the roses on my grave.” It’s slow, yet it isn’t a ballad, and toward the end it reminded me of something from the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. How mysterious is that?

“MC 5” is punky pop that rips in just under three minutes. And just to even it up, the last track, “Atlanta”, is a pure pop ballad rip-off of “Favorite Things” from the film Sound Of Music. The string section and Weiland’s scratchy vocals can’t hide the fact that he borrowed the melody.

They’ve had their ups and downs. Each album is an organism all its own, often an altogether separate entity from it’s predecessors. No. 4 seems to have borrowed the energy leftover from their initial offering, Core. I will admit, I didn’t expect to enjoy this album; Stone Temple Pilots’ work has been dropping off with each and every release, and Weiland’s solo album was just artsy crap. But here they prove they can still be good. I just don’t know if they can once again be great.

+ cc morris