Stone Temple Pilots Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop (180g 45RPM 2LP) (Use code: FREESHIPPING at Checkout Two Orders or More UK Only) Pre-Order

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Stone Temple Pilots Go Glam and Get Psychedelic on Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop: Includes “Big Bang Baby” and “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart"

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. 

Seen through that lens and the hindsight afforded history, and appreciated independent of the self-righteous authenticity standards of the day,  Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop sounds borderline fearless while authoritatively checking all the right boxes for fun, flavor, and finesse. Part winking send-up, part tribute to the glitter rock age, and part middle finger towards the hip crowd that didn’t know what they were missing, this mid-90s classic repeatedly invites you to drop the needle and press play.

Side A:

1. Press Play
2. Pop’s Love Suicide
3. Tumble in the Rough

Side B:

1. Big Bang Baby
2. Lady Picture Show
3. And So I Know

Side C:

1. Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart
2. Art School Girl
3. Adhesive

Side D:

1. Ride The Cliché
2. Daisy
3. Seven Caged Tigers