Maybe it's a little early for Scott Weiland to be going the solo way. He's made only three albums with Stone Temple Pilots; things were getting real interesting with the freak-pop kicks of 1996's Tiny Music ... Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop. The singer hasn't entirely digested his influences, either There are telltale tracks of David Bowie, the Beatles and the solo John Lennon all over 12 Bar Blues. And at times Weiland is blessed with too much inspiration. In "About Nothing," he wedges a spaghetti-western sound-effects bridge into the knockout mix of pinched-distortion sleaze and cracked-crystal vocal harmonies. It's as if, after four years of drug- and STP-related
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crises, Weiland wants to cram as much life as he can into his next last chance.
But that urgency and energy count for a lot. One of the best things about 12 Bar Blues is its heady, willfully messy momentum. You can almost feel Weiland hugging the rails as he careens from pop-science sound games in "Cool Kiss" and "Jimmy Was a Stimulator" (cheeseball beat boxes, scuzzed-up synths) to the plain-spoken, plainly sung "Son" ("You make the world a better place to find") and the smart alterna-glam grooming of "Mockingbird Girl." Vocally, Weiland has backed away from the big-rock anguish of STP hits like "Plush"; he sings in high-pitched close-up over the plastic static of the guitars in "Desperation #5." And in "Barbarella," a clever spinoff from Bowie's "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," the band shuts down for a verse as Weiland plays the hapless rock-star fuck-up with believable self-loathing: "Grab a scale and guess the weight of all the pain I've given with my name/I'm a selfish piece of shit."
Even when Weiland seems to throw words and music together just to see what sticks – like the great nonsense couplet in "Barbarella," "You sing the pink love fuzz/And dance the musty queer" – he makes a potent kind of sense. Ricocheting from art noise to mad pop, free association to outright confession, 12 Bar Blues is a record about looking for reason, about negotiating a balance between rational obligation and excited, often destructive, impulse. "The Date" – a slow ballad that sounds as though Weiland dipped the tape in an acid bath during mixing – is just Weiland on vocals and all instruments, screaming at the end like a guy wearing all his mistakes on his shoulders and keen to shake' em off at the first sign of daylight.
12 Bar Blues isn't really a rock album, or even a pop album. Weiland, out on his own, has simply made an honest album – honest in its confusion, ambition and indulgence. It was worth the risk. (RS 783)
DAVID FRICKE
