Stone Temple Pilots

This is going to hurt a lot, so let’s get it out of the way: Shangri-La Dee Da is really fucking catchy. Compelling in the same way a sore tooth demands that you vigilantly light up your pain receptors with your tongue every couple of minutes, the new Stone Temple Pilots disc is an awesome cavity of an album. As usual, the lyrics (Tuesday shoot me in the head, reliably idiotic singer Scott Weiland requests on “Days of the Week”) stink like Limburger in a hot picnic basket. But about half of the disc hits Lenny Kravitz heights of ersatz ’70s drunken bliss.

That half, led by the now de rigueur sensitive number, “Wonderful,” doesn’t diverge much from the Pilots’ previous path. Guitar effects and a firm backbeat push Weiland along on that song, making room for a double-tracked, heroic-chord-change chorus and Dean DeLeo’s pretty — yes, pretty — slide solo. It’s futile to resist “Wonderful,” the next song, “Black Again,” and the electric-piano-driven follow-up, “Hello, It’s Late,” all near-perfect imitations of actual decent pop songs.

But don’t worry. The other half, including the equally de rigueur bid for hard-rock airplay, “Dumb Love,” recapitulates most of STP’s insincere tics and tackiness. STP is still a band that genuflects to chunkiness, its rhythms and stuttering guitar parts farting like Pavarotti after a trip to Olive Garden. This time, the group almost leaves behind its insufferable impulse toward romanticizing lost-boy bullshit instead of just making lost-boy rock.