Stone Temple Pilots - Shangri-La Dee Da (LP) - Yellow/Orange Splatter Vinyl

Stone Temple Pilots’ fifth album, Shangri-La Dee Da, arrived on June 19, 2001, and it still plays like a band refusing to calcify. After the hard swing back to riff-rock on No. 4, this one leans into color and contrast. Brendan O’Brien is back in the producer’s chair, and you can hear his steady hand from the first punch of Dumb Love to the hazy hush of the closing stretch. The band set up shop in a Malibu house to make it, living and recording together, and that residential vibe comes through. The performances feel lived in, rough-edged in the right places, and then suddenly lit with little bits of polish, like sun flares across the mix.

Everyone talks about Days of the Week because it’s the clear pop single. It deserved the radio love. Robert DeLeo’s bass bounces, Dean DeLeo jangles and stings in equal measure, and Scott Weiland finds that bittersweet hook he could summon almost at will. But the album’s shape is wider than the single suggests. Hollywood Bitch blasts out with a smirk and a glam snap, a reminder that this band always kept a strong grip on melody even when the guitars were snarling. Then there is Wonderful, a tender ballad that belongs with their most graceful moments. Weiland sings like someone trying to keep the room from breaking apart, and O’Brien frames him with patient guitars and understated keys.

Part of the record’s charm is how it maps their range without feeling scattered. Hello It’s Late is one of those deep cuts that sneaks up and stays. It is roomy and reflective, a late-night drive of a song with a chorus that lands gently but sticks. A Song for Sleeping, written for Weiland’s newborn son, closes the emotional loop with plain-spoken warmth. The band had talked about making Shangri-La Dee Da a double album, and you can sense the ambition in the tracklist. It is full of detours, but most of them feel earned. Even the bruisers like Coma and the sludgy churn of Bi-Polar Bear arrive with detail in the corners, little harmony lines and percussive tics that keep the songs alive on repeat plays.

Dean and Robert DeLeo don’t get enough credit for how elegantly they move between textures. Dean’s guitars shift from thick, open-chord crunch to bright, 12‑string sparkle without calling attention to the mechanics. Robert’s bass lines dance around the kick drum, melodic but never fussy. Eric Kretz anchors it all with that dry, efficient snap that O’Brien loves to capture. The production is clean but not slick. You can hear air moving in the room, and when the band locks in, the tape seems to lean forward with them.

Critically, the album landed in a solid place. Reviews at the time noted the mix of punch and pop and praised the craft, even as some listeners were still hung up on genre lines. History has been kind. Fans often single out Wonderful, Hello It’s Late, and Days of the Week as standouts, but the whole sequence makes the case for STP as a song band first. The stylistic tags never told the full story. By 2001, they were comfortable bending their own rules.

If you collect Stone Temple Pilots vinyl, this one is a sleeper favorite. The low-end warmth and those layered guitars open up nicely on a good turntable, and the dynamic swings make sense when you can ride the volume a little. Shangri-La Dee Da vinyl has become the kind of record people talk about in shops, the “oh, you need to hear this side two” recommendation. If you buy Stone Temple Pilots records online, keep an eye out and do not be surprised if it sells quickly. Browsing Stone Temple Pilots albums on vinyl in a cozy Melbourne record store, or digging through bins of vinyl records Australia wide, this is the copy you pull out for a friend who only knows the early hits.

What keeps me coming back is the balance. The band is clearly working through personal and musical crossroads, yet they sound united. You get swagger, but you also get patience. You get choruses you can hum for days, but you also get the small human moments, like the cracked edges in Weiland’s voice on the ballads or the way the rhythm section relaxes into a groove and refuses to rush. It is not a Greatest Hits package, and that is the point. Shangri-La Dee Da rewards time spent with it. In a catalog that already holds Core and Purple, that is saying something.