Stone Temple Pilots "Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop" 2xLP

THIS IS A PREORDER. IT SHIPS JUNE

Any orders containing a "Pre-Order" item will ship together when the pre-order ships. Please make a separate order if you wish to receive non pre-order items before the pre-order ship date.

Experience the Double-Platinum 1996 Album in Audiophile Sound for the First Time: Mobile Fidelity’s Numbered-Edition 180g 45RPM 2LP Set Is Sourced from the Original Analog Tapes

1/2” / 30 IPS analog master to DSD 256 to analog console to lathe

If great art, as many believe, is inherently polarizing, then the Stone Temple Pilots’ Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop easily ranks as the California-based band’s finest album. Simultaneously celebrated and castigated upon release in spring 1996, the group’s third full-length finds vocalist Scott Weiland and company expanding their “grunge” palette with a smart blend of glam rock, psychedelia, jangle pop, and other related styles. Having benefited from long-view reassessments that shed the biases and meanness of initial criticisms, the double-platinum effort is now largely and rightly seen as a creative masterwork. All the more reason why it deserves reference-grade production. 

Sourced from the original analog tapes, pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing, and housed in a gatefold Stoughton jacket, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition 180g 45RPM 2LP set presents Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop in audiophile sound for the first time. Benefitting from exceptional groove definition, quiet surfaces, and black backgrounds, the collectible edition plays with levels of separation, imaging, and dynamics that further raise the profile on what the quartet accomplished on an album recorded at Westerly Ranch — a sprawling location north of Santa Barbara, CA, where a 25,000-square-foot mansion and surrounding property turned into an exploratory canvas for the band’s ambitions. 

Smooth and diverse, those traits are everywhere on Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop. From the clever combination of emotional closeness and distance he brings to the catchy albeit ultimately melancholic “Lady Picture Show”; to the lounge-fly balladeering that causes “And So I Know” to lightly swing akin to a bleary-eyed house band’s final number at a 4 A.M. bar; to the effortless cool and laissez-faire casualness he articulates on the grinding “Pop’s Love Suicide”; to the dimensional raspiness, defiant energy, and let-loose wail that sail through the crunchy “Big Bang Baby.”