Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Entertainment Weekly | B |
| Kerrang! | |
| Robert Christgau | B− |
| Rolling Stone | (mixed) |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | |
Don Kaye of Kerrang! praised the band's "confidence and identity", unusual in debut albums. However, the album still received mixed reviews overall. Music journalists often blasted the band as "rip-offs" of grunge bands such as Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. Entertainment Weekly gave the album a B rating, saying "Stone Temple Pilots' hit 'Sex Type Thing' could be Mike Tyson's rape defense transcribed into grunge rock. It's unclear whether STP, which sounds like it has crash-landed Pearl Jam into Alice in Chains, is condemning or identifying with its narrator. With a real point of view, this band could be bigger than an accident."
The sharp divide between the band's growing fanbase and their critics was evident: in the midst of the album's success, the band was simultaneously voted Best New Band by Rolling Stone's readers and Worst New Band by the magazine's music critics in January 1994. Regarding the album's initial reception, Weiland told Entertainment Weekly in 2008, "It was really painful in the beginning because I just assumed that the critics would understand where we were coming from, that these just weren't dumb rock songs".
"Plush" won the 1994 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock Performance. Stone Temple Pilots also won the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist award at the 1993 MTV Music Video Awards.
Read more about this topic: Core (Stone Temple Pilots album)
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