Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,121 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 62% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 7.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Music review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Who Kill
Lowest review score: 0 Fireflies
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,691 out of 3121
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3121
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3121
3121 music reviews
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    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    G I R L
    G I R L may have benefited from a few more introspective trips back to the drawing board.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oxymoron
    He has the instincts of a good storyteller, and maybe even the potential to be a standard bearer for his art form, but when he falls back on tired "pimps and hoes" narratives, he sounds firmly, frustratingly rooted in the past.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music Speaks
    One can only hope she escapes the pitfalls of being a non-songwriting R&B singer in an inhospitable pop scene and finds collaborators who know what to do with a good old-fashioned powerhouse.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Voices
    Unfortunately, Carter enjoys a much larger presence this time around, and as the two largely split vocal duties, Voices rarely has a chance to establish any momentum before getting tripped up by its own inconsistency.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lo-Fantasy
    Whether drudging up stale '80s-rock signifiers or indulging in lifeless electronic frivolity, this is an album that attempts to skate by on pure surface appeal in order to distract from the obtuse social commentary at its core.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Angel Guts: Red Classroom
    Angel Guts is yet another example that the world needs a guy like Jamie Stewart treating music the way Jamie Stewart does: painfully, harshly, intuitively, and with psychotic aplomb.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    After the Disco
    Generic enough to have been produced by anyone, After the Disco is a yawner made by two artists whose impressive discography makes its failure that much more confounding.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Have Fun with God
    Compared to Dream River, Have Fun with God sounds like a featureless expanse of echoing congas, with the artist occasionally rising from the depths to sing something that doesn't make sense.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Warpaint
    Given Warpaint's complex, operatic highs, its experiments in minimalism and tranquility make for some awfully low lows, but there are worse things than a band that seems to be evolving in two directions at once.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fading West
    Jon Foreman's ability to write hook-laden melodies remains, and he's an often poetic and perspicacious lyricist, but the themes of redemption and hope on Fading West are too abstracted, frequently degenerating into cliché.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    High Hopes
    Morello appears on most of the tracks here, and he's largely an enlivening presence, electrifying Springsteen's revolutionary spark, but he still hasn't figured out how to open up a solo without changing the entire tone of a song. Springsteen himself has a similar problem, struggling to deliver pointed social critique without sliding into his comfort zones.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wig Out at Jagbags
    It's an uneasy détente in the continuing conflict between its creator's best and worst impulses.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Mary Christmas
    A Mary Christmas is an undeniably listenable but sadly too-safe hodgepodge of department-store standards, kid-friendly showtunes given glockenspiel-enriched arrangements to seem more festive, and one or two white-elephant gifts from out of leftfield.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    7 Days of Funk
    It's a welcome sign of life from an MC who many assumed to be over the hill, and where it fails, it fails on its own terms--and that's a kind of success in itself.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Because the Internet
    Bloated with all manner of interstitial suites and assorted skit-like stopgaps, the 19-track Because the Internet could serviceably represent the titular web Glover finds so perplexing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Panties
    The onslaught of bawdy imagery eventually grows tedious, but there's something compelling about witnessing one man's psyche laid so completely bare, a crazed prophet whipped into a frenzy by the ecstasy of his own sin.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Drive All Night [EP]
    Whereas the rest of the EP feels contrived, with Hansard coasting on grade-school-level insights into romance, the title track captures the controlled intensity that's been a signature of Hansard's dusty troubadour aesthetic.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sum/One
    As a producer, DeGraw's sonic instincts are nearly beyond reproach, his carefully sculpted synthscapes frequently gorgeous and never boring. But maximalist excess afflicts too much of SUM/ONE, to rapidly diminishing returns.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Britney Jean
    Despite the absence of longtime producer Max Martin and his associates, the album is a surprisingly retrograde affair, with midtempo tracks marred by dated production and vocals that hark back to the days when Brit was selling 10 million.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: Catching Fire [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    The album's old-guard pros sadly don't lend much more to the proceedings than their younger counterparts.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Midnight Memories
    The tracks may recall "Pour Some Sugar on Me," but their lyrics are still all "I'm not scared of love/'Cause when I'm not with you I'm weaker," so essentially the album's potentially nastiest tracks come off as a glorified Halloween costume act. More believable are the moments when they lay off the hard sell.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Loved Me Back to Life
    Dion's cover of Janis Ian's rueful "At Seventeen" comes off less like a lament for childhood dreams that didn't come to pass and more like a lilting word of advice from someone old enough to know better, which is precisely the zone where the album excels: when Dion drops the act and embraces her manic, Hallmark card-brandishing guru of schmaltz.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Free Your Mind
    Considering their rather straightforward musical blueprint, every Cut Copy album is a bit of a recycle job, but Free Your Mind seems excessively so, almost to the point of motorized lifelessness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Marshall Mathers LP 2
    The album's production offers little that's new. Dr. Dre and Rick Rubin have crafted, or at least enabled, a few too many of the power-ballad slow jams that Eminem has grown increasingly fond of, alongside several guitar-driven anthems that come on as subtle as Jock Jams. Eminem is no one's hack, though, and the album has tantalizing moments of vintage performance.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lousy with Sylvianbriar
    Lousy with Sylvianbriar is, quite simply, a weary album.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love to Love You Donna
    The lesson isn't so much "don't mess with perfection," but rather "don't bother trying to gild the lily of genius. To uneven ends, the collection of newly commissioned remixes in the tribute compilation Love to Love You Donna dance around that notion.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prism
    She largely sticks to her tried-and-true pop template, each song tailor-made for mass consumption with mixed results.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New
    While the brave-faced, sunny music that defines the album's back half may be as contrived as his jolly public persona, it's the touches of humanizing anxiety that make New significant, revealing active signs of creative life.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bitter Rivals
    While "24" might be the best song Sleigh Bells have penned to date.... The rest of the album doesn't fare so well, and like the proverbial Potemkin village, its bravado is illusory, its songs precarious, one-dimensional façades that sag under anything more than a passing listen.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magpie and the Dandelion
    Too many edges have been sanded off the brothers' music, and whether the blame lies with Rubin's influence or the accelerated writing pace, the result is an album devoid of the band's usual charming lyrics and adroit melodies.
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