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 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 housed in mini- LP-style packaging, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD presents Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop in audiophile sound for the first time on disc. It plays with enhanced levels of clarity, 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 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 press play.