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, 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 of initial criticisms, the double-platinum effort is now largely and rightly seen as a creative masterwork. 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 burrow into a smorgasbord of big hooks and glossy choruses. 

Sourced from the original analog tapes and pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing, 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, it plays with levels of separation, imaging, and dynamics that raise the profile on what the quartet accomplished on an album recorded at a California ranch that turned into an exploratory canvas for the group’s ambitions. You can hear the multitude of details and tonalities with previously unattained clarity, presence, and scope, as well as the impact and punch every rock record deserves. Another tremendous asset: The depth, grain, and pitch of Weiland’s voice. Get ready to drop the needle and listen to it play.