Stone Temple Pilots - Greatest Hits

But, as the years pass, the turmoil gradually fades away (even though Weiland was arrested for DUI weeks before the release of this album), and the music stands at center stage, and it's best heard on Thank You, a 14track collection of the group's hits (the album clocks in at 15 tracks, but "Plush" is repeated in a widely popular acoustic version). Though each record found STP trying different things and each has a clutch of good album tracks, they were at their best as a singles act, since that's where the strengths DeLeo's knack for catchy, monstrous riffs, Weiland's insanely hooky neopsychedelic melodies, the band's tight, propulsive rhythms, Brendan O'Brien's clean yet intricate production lie. Although they seemed rather cookiecutter at first, thanks partially to the clobbering grunge of "Sex Type Thing" used as their debut single, the jumbled chronology of Thank You forces the listener to see each track as its own work and judge it on its own merits. And, based on that, it's clear that Stone Temple Pilots were one of the great singles bands of the '90s. Single for single, they had a dynamic mix of crunching hard rock and sugary, slightly trippy melodies, underscored by a real sense of urgency and perfect production by O'Brien, where each track unfolded with layer upon layer of sonic detail and no song outstayed its welcome. This was altrock played as classic rock it played by the rules of '70s album rock, but its amalgam of sounds and styles, where STP poached from metal, glam, bubblegum, the Beatles, and album rock in equal measure, was purely a creation of the '90s, where postmodern aesthetics became part of the mainstream. And, within the mainstream, nobody did it better than Stone Temple Pilots. Yes, their peers certainly had more indie credibility, but great pop music isn't about credibility; it's how the music sounds, and STP made music that sounded great at the time and even better now.