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For all the Stone Temple Pilots' concrete strengths -- seamless musicianship and a knack for crafting catchy hooks -- they suffer from a persistent lack of inventiveness; the things that make their songs so memorable are the same things that have made lots of other bands' songs so memorable. Comprised of 3/4 of STP + singer Dave Coutts, Talk Show isn't so much a side project as it is a slight variation on STP's standard formula (classic.rock aesthetic + alt.rock attitude). Though Coutts replaces Scott Weiland's beefy vocals with a suppler, more smouldery delivery, in the end, the TS equation amounts to essentially the same product as STP. Parked comfortably between the Beatles' "Drive My Car" and Queen's "I'm In Love With My Car," "Everybody Loves My Car" idles with grimy pop charm; "Hello Hello" appropriates a grittily sweet disposition from the Fab Four via Cheap Trick; "Peeling an Orange" is a sensitive, acousticky interlude threaded with a harmonica that might have been cloned from strains of the harp solo Stevie Wonder wove into "Isn't She Lovely"; "Behind" drifts through a melancholy space bounded on one side by John Lennon and Pink Floyd on the other. Overall, Talk Show achieves an appealing balance of grinding rock and succulent pop, yet in the end its songs come up short not because of the band's chronic tendency to cop ideas from other artists (that's par for the course in popular music) but because the songs just don't pack the kind of emotional resonance that can galvanize the most hackneyed conventions. As toothsome as the tunes are, the mood swings they convey come off like so many poses -- striking perhaps, but ultimately insubstantial. Sandy Masuo Copyright � 1994-1999 CDNOW, Inc. All rights reserved. Credit: CDNOW
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