The excellent “Church on Tuesday” is next beginning with jangly guitar before transiting into more robust secondary riff before then returning to the original riff. Still, the track features an interesting schizophrenic riff with grooving bass underneath and Scott Weiland sounds the best he had in years on this track, a vocal performance that interestingly gets better and better as the album progresses.

As such the track feels slightly throwaway not because it’s an awful track, far from it, it just feels like it’s been done before and done slightly better. “Pruno” follows and it is so far the first track on No.4 that follows the tried and true trip rock/pop of STP’s previous two records. The song is great fun and something of an underrated tune from the band. This vibe continues with the next track “Heaven & Hotrods”, beginning with a wonderful gasoline soaked snaky riff which continues throughout the verse sections before opening into a sunburst chorus section all the time anchored by Robert’s rumbling bass and metronome drumming from Kretz with Weiland deploying the style of vocal that would find much favor later in his Velvet Revolver days. “Down” neatly showcases the more heavy aspects of the bands sound and harkens back to the Core days, a great opener to the record. Beginning with an impossibly heavy down-tuned riff, the track lurches in a metallic mass punctuated by a catchy chorus refrain of “Yeah I’ve been waiting for my Sunday girl” before featuring a frantic riff from Dean Deleo. No.4 kicks things off with “Down”, the lead single from the album. He was genuinely sober, genuinely focused, looking great and all there… a great energy to take the band to the next place” with Kretz stating that “The touring for No.4 was great, when Scott got out of jail completely sober, finally clean and he was on fire” and Dean Deleo stating that “straight out, he was clean…he felt like he had a lot of ground to make up”‘ In truth all the band did it was high time for the band to get the show back on the road and deliver and boy, did they. Conversely, the surviving members, speaking to Yahoo Music in 2017 candidly discussed their frustrations with their troubled front-man with Robert Deleo stating that “Resentment was growing since Purple… there was a window during the making of No.4 that Scott, genuinely, had got the clarity of the Core days.

Brendan O’Brien our brilliant longtime producer, urged us simply to put our hearts and souls on the line” and described, rather dismissively, the resulting album as “a good record of generic rock”. Weiland, writing in his autobiography, described the writing sessions for the record as: “…the songs were written together live. However, time heals all wounds sometimes and it was not long before both parties realized more music should be made for the betterment of everyone involved. Indeed Weiland himself had being busy around this time also, with the release of his debut solo album 12 Bar Blues and still harboring some resentment toward his estranged band-mates after a perceived public trashing by band in a press conference some time before. Following the success of 1996’s Tiny Music, STP had entered something of a hiatus, thanks in part to singer Scott Weiland’s ongoing drug addictions which had left the remaining band members bassist Robert Deleo, guitarist Dean Deleo and drummer Eric Kretz to form a side band called Talk Show, whilst Weiland tried to clean up his act. On October 26th 1999, Stone Temple Pilots released their fourth studio album entitled, yes you guessed right, No.4 to favorable to mixed reviews from critics.

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