Stone Temple Pilots - Shangri-la Dee Da CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

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.

GREG KOT
(RS 872 - July 5, 2001)