Three 65, Day 47
Stone Temple Pilots, No. 4

A lot of people don't like Stone Temple Pilots (henceforth referred to as STP for the sake of my carpal tunnel syndrome), and that's okay by me. I get it. I mean, they started off as a cash-grab - Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains were all original bands, and STP raped their sound for everything it was worth on their debut album, Core.

But a strange thing happened over the next few albums: the outer STP, the grunge-clone, stripped itself away - molted - and a real, honest-to-goodness band emerged. The fully formed STP explored its softer side on their second album, Purple, and found melody with their third album, Tiny Music. But it was their fourth album (rather anticlimactically named No. 4) where everything came together.

Sure, the first three tracks bring the hard rock goods - "Down" is one of the heaviest songs they've ever recorded - but I want to talk about the pop. "Church On Tuesday" closes with vocalist Scott Weiland singing "na na na na," which is... weird for a band as overtly hard rock as STP. "Sour Girl" takes things even farther, with a psychedelic pop sound that, minus the studio polish, could have made it to college radio in the late 80s. Elsewhere, "No Way Out" is a mix of both styles - heavy on the verses, atmospheric and psychedelic on the choruses. And "Atlanta," the closing ballad, sounds almost exactly like The Doors - no mean feat for a band that started out aping the Seattle sound.