Stone Temple Pilots - Core


I was naughty and bought some records earlier this week. Hopefully they ship out tomorrow or saturday. It's like there's a shortage of packaging materials or something. Oh well, it's not like i didn't wait months for Guiot's l'Univers de la Mer to get from Sweden to Iowa, let's just go back to albums i didn't write about in my 3 books (i also told you the collection is over a thousand, didn't i?). 

Core. What an album. Invisible Purple is of course my favorite STP album, but wowzers that debut is smack you in the face awesome. Supposedly it's Core, as in the apple core left behind after Adam and Eve did that Bob James/Rasheeda Azar impression that made Skip blush like "well, i never!" Fun fact, the actual fruit is unspecified. Some random guy decided it should be "apple" so he could copyright his version of the bible. The internet told me that, so grain of salt, you know?

The important point is these are all character pieces from the mindset of "a sinner."  Eve apparently called him a creep. 

It's a fantastic album, but it's Brendan O'Brien. The acoustic guitar stuff is incredible, the electric alternative rock parts are a homogeneous cacophony of indistinguishable incomprehensibility. Everything that isn't vocals or snare drums sounds like garlic mashed-potatoes. That's a shame, because on the rare occasions when only two or three sounds are happening the tones are gorgeous.

I made it sound like that was a bad thing. It's not, really. Nothing is muddy or obnoxious. Everything works for the song at hand, it's just a shame that the album is flat-line as far as dynamics are concerned. A few of these songs deserve the added meaning of being slightly softer/louder, but nope, brick wall everything. 

What is worth noting is that there is a fair amount of metal hiding in here. It quickly goes back to harmonically complex Alt-Rock, but some of these riffs are metal AF. On the other hand, i don't think i'm making up the feeling that their future music can only diffuse out into multiple less-coherent or interconnected musical avenues. Core sounds like the pinnacle and it's all down hill from here. Purple is by far my favorite, but Core is basically perfect and thus sadly cannot be improved upon. Like it or not, they got it right the first time.

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