Stone Temple Pilots

The year 1994 signaled grunge’s last grunt as the dominant sound of alterna-teen culture. While Soundgarden enjoyed their first No. 1 record with Superunknown, Pearl Jam were actively avoiding MTV to deflate their own hype and the Nirvana saga came to a tragic end. But where Stone Temple Pilots’ 1992 debut, Core, presented the San Diego upstarts as eager shotgun riders on the grunge wave, their 1994 follow-up savvily anticipated the changing cultural tides by looking beyond Seattle for inspiration.
Purple hardly skimps on the hard-rock swagger that made Core a multi-platinum smash—the frenzied “Unglued” and sludgy “Meatplow” pack the sort of pulverizing riffs that launched a million stage dives. But the album reveals surprising new dimensions to Stone Temple Pilots’ attack: On “Vasoline,” they hammer away at a fuzzy two-note refrain until it locks into a hypnotic psychedelic groove (the bongos certainly help), and while “Big Empty” revisits the skyscraping peaks of Core’s calling-card single, “Plush,” it takes its sweet time getting there atop some bluesy slide-guitar licks.
The most dramatic developments, however, are happening in Scott Weiland’s larynx. No longer the Vedder-like warbler of old, the singer invests the campfire-folk reprieve “Pretty Penny” with Beatles-esque bonhomie, and showcases a previously untapped sensitivity on “Interstate Love Song,” which sounds like a ‘70s soft-rock ballad dressed up in a flannel shirt and cut-off shorts. A resounding repudiation of the critics who initially dismissed them as alt-rock also-rans, Purple displays the first real flashes of the melodic ingenuity and glammy eccentricity that would ultimately distinguish Stone Temple Pilots from their mosh-pit peers.

Tracklisting

Meatplow (3:38)
Vasoline (2:56)
Lounge Fly (5:17)
Interstate Love Song (3:13)
Still Remains (3:32)
Pretty Penny (3:43)
Silvergun Superman (5:16)
Big Empty (4:54)
Unglued (2:34)
Army Ants (3:46)
Kitchenware & Candybars (8:05)

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