Shangri-La Dee Da

Stone Temple Pilots use their fifth studio album to again prove their singular ability to balance ridiculously heavy rock with dreamy psychedelia. After unloading two of the classic lineup’s most devastating grooves in “Dumb Love” and “Coma,” they entrance listeners with “Wonderful,” a trippy love ballad of unabashed beauty. No stranger to communing with his myriad demons, Weiland reveals some of his darkest poetry on “Bi-Polar Bear,” a brutal portrait of mental disorder wrapped inside ’70s-style pop that would make Harry Nilsson envious.

The feather-boa’d butch of ‘Hollywood Bitch’ and the fire-breathing ‘Dumb Love’ prove their metal mettle, yet while it’s good to see people survive, it’s impossible to forget that Stone Temple Pilots were always the Flat Earth Society of grunge, clinging to its most conservative tenets long after the original protagonists had moved on.

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