Stone Temple Pilots

When San Diego's Stone Temple Pilots showed up a few years late to the Seattle flannel-shirt party (arriving from a few hundred miles to the south), critics sharpened their claws and sounded the alarm: the groundbreaking grunge movement had crossed over. True, the grinding guitars and gravely man-howl of frontman Scott Weiland didn't break an inch of ground, but the clutch of singles here -- commercial anthems like "Plush," "Creep," "Sex Type Thing" and "Wicked Garden" -- grabbed the MTV audience by the throat and propelled the debut to triple platinum.

With Eric Kretz bashing the skins like a Bonham manqué and axman Robert DeLeo ladling
murk, Core is a testosteronefest. So thickly the sweat drips that when Weiland, resident
shaman, gruffly mourns, "I'm half the man I used to be" ("Creep"), one shudders. "Plush"
devoured radio with its mix of guitar grandiosity and woolly philosophizing; "Wicked
Garden," another big single, waxes equally pompous. The inner child of Stone T... More >

Once you learn to tell them from the Stoned Tempo Pirates, the Stolen Pesto Pinenuts, the Gray-Templed Prelates, Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam, and Wishbone Ash, you may decide they're a halfway decent hard rock act. Unfortunately, sometime after they've set you up with their best power chords, you figure out the title is "Sex Type Thing" because it's attached to a rape threat. They claim this was intended as a critique, kind of like "Naked Sunday"'s sarcastic handshake with authority. But at best that means they should reconceive their aesthetic strategy--critiquewise, irony has no teeth when the will to sexual power still powers your power chords. And if it's merely the excuse MTV fans have reason to suspect, the whole band should catch AIDS and die. (Grade: B-)