Stone Temple Pilots - Perdida

Oh Perdida, what are we going to do with you. You can't just say Stone Temple Pilots made a Country album, because the album sounds absolutely bizarre if you aren't familiar with Stone Temple Pilots. If you are familiar with STP, then Jeff Gutt is probably going to sound like a Scott Weiland impersonator of disgusting proportions.

I didn't like this thing at all on first listen. 4 years ago Rolling Stone called it generic, but nobody actually reads Rolling Stone anymore, so we're going to go with "generic" is what they were trying to achieve. It's pretty, the songs are actually good for forlorn yet hopeful love ballads, there's tons of quirky STP harmonies and melodic twists, and even I can accept that Gutt just happens to sound a lot like Weiland. Today it's actually sounding really enjoyable. Sure it's a giant stretch, but it's undeniably STP.

You know me, the real test is the concept. Well, yeah, he's all alone in a monochrome desert singing love songs to Perdida: of course it's a lushly acoustic country tinged soft rock album with flute solos and shimmery heat haze everywhere. We're a whole world away from the Alt-Metal sinner's perspective of Core, but we aren't at all far removed from the kitchy, watery, synchronized swimming Art-Rock of Tiny Music.... If you're going to criticize anything, it sounds like STP turned the song Sour Girl into the complete new persona of the band. 

If I'm being brutally honest, STP's upward trajectory was 3 albums. No. 4, Shangi-la-di-da, and both self-titled albums are completely uninteresting outside of stubborn completionism. It's totally possible to like them, but they all have the overwhelmingly unpleasant smell of just trying to keep the brand alive. Perdida, as weird as it is on first listen, sounds like this is actually what they wanted to do at the time, unleash a complete anachronism on the general public in early 2020. Give it another listen, it sounds like they preemptively refused to participate in the complete insanity that lay ahead. I can't say they were even remotely wrong, because there isn't even a whiff of shitshow about it one way or the other. It lacks any sense of "quarantine album," during or after, and it's honestly a timeless breath of fresh air blowing across the swamp we're still wading across.

Mark your calendars, July 24 is the day Bottle completely came around and learned to enjoy STP's 7th album Perdida. He doesn't particularly need to prevent you from buying his copy, so head over to bottlesmusic if you're interested in micro financing his brick and mortar dreams of record store ownership, but I [snap] I mean he doesn't hate it even slightly anymore.