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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scars
    Scars is a peculiarly irritating sort of failure. It's an overachieving, overqualified failure.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Way
    For all its lofty goals and risky production decisions, the album runs out of steam with such sudden regression that it becomes impossible to advocate Brown's "way."
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Manafon
    Its spaces of hollow inaction are far too big, and the concessions it expects of its audience far too large for so little payoff.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love 2
    Consistently smooth to the point of tedium, Love 2 has the unruffled air of '50s bachelor-pad cool, often recalling Enoch Light and other space-age instrumentalists, but its overbearing electronic elements negate the organic feel it would otherwise inherit from those albums, leaving an impressively dispassionate patina with almost nothing underneath.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Turning the Mind
    Whether creative flaw or conscious production choice, the uneven clip of this and other tracks prevents Turning the Mind from achieving the spatial, bliss-ridden freedom on which shoegaze thrives. Instead, Chapman pulls the reins back one time too many.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Embryonic
    Embryonic, then, sounds like an over-correction to that trend, pushing the Lips's sound back into more experimental territory.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Six
    At times this fascination with dark, eerie sulkiness can have a certain kind of weird charm; more commonly, it's a grating, self-serious masquerade.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In This Light & On This Evening
    Despite embracing their electronic influences with much gusto on these more inspired outings, though, the record's middle stretch feels both forced and forgettable.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Told You I Was Freaky
    The material is better served in context, complete with music videos and framed with dialogue, whereas as a standalone record it misses more than it hits.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Will We Be
    Through supplementation and wider instrumentation, he's traded in quiet haunting oddness for drowsy tranquil oddness, an exchange that may at some time pay better dividends than it does here.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Play On
    She still lacks the grit and the distinctive, intuitive phrasing of the best country singers, but the better moments of Play On suggest that she's capable of developing into more than a technically proficient cipher.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Swords
    Considering the quality of the singles drawn from "You Are the Quarry," "Ringleader of the Tormentors," and "Years of Refusal," it's an utter disappointment that Swords, the collection of B-sides from those singles, is so uneven.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Reality Killed The Video Star
    By downplaying Williams's formerly irrepressible charm, Reality simply doesn't make for an effective reintroduction to one of the U.S. pop market's biggest missed opportunities.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Echo
    Whether it's a chugging slow burner or an amped-up club jam, the material here is pretty unimaginative, and not a single song approaches the formidable 'Bleeding Love.'
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Seventh Seal
    Suffice to say there's nothing very compelling here, though Seventh Seal is made interesting by the paucity of Rakim's material.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fall Be Kind [EP]
    Thus, when not overextending the disappointing, unfinished musical projects on Fall Be Kind's, the Collective are busy beating their promising ideas into monotony.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Til The Casket Drops
    Clipse seemed much more comfortable on Road, nesting inside the work of others. Casket provides no such comfort, finding them without their usual subject matter or a strong musical backbone, resulting in a clear sense of discomfort.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Malice N Wonderland
    Malice N Wonderland (anxiously awaiting the sequel, Through the Hook N Grass) is overcrowded and undercrunk compared to its uneven but exponentially more ambitious predecessor, "Ego Trippin."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Element Of Freedom
    With so few highlights, an unwieldy 52-minute runtime, and a second half nearly devoid of strong material, Freedom doesn't begin to contend with that release--or indeed, even many of those by Keys's objectively less talented contemporaries.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stronger With Each Tear
    Blige's frequent problems with pitch control [on "I Can See in Color"] mar what should have been the album's finest moment. Instead, the song is just indicative of the larger problem with Stronger: None of the elements that actually work ever manage to do so at the same time.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Swan
    It's an expertly crafted pop record, sure, but Black Swan ultimately reduces to its primary points of reference without any broader context or sense of purpose.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scratch My Back
    Much of this material feels beneath him. What doesn't initially is brought down to that level by an absence of any real idea of how to give these songs a distinctive cast.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Work
    Work's sweetness is uneven and awkward, managing very little ecstasy despite all the heartfelt pining and soft atmospherics.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Permalight
    Permalight is a startling contrast in subdued grace and awkward severity, alternately rewarding and punishing as the band seeks to craft a new voice without entirely abandoning the old.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Broken Bells
    At its very best, when the collaboration clicks, Broken Bells boasts some truly marvelous songs, but these peaks are sandwiched between tracks that struggle to exceed colorless tedium.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Easton Corbin
    The album recalls the series of interchangeable, filler-packed albums Strait recorded in the mid '90s. Corbin sings well enough, but lacks the maturity and depth of experience to elevate some of the record's middling material.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In The Dark
    In the Dark is an excessively fundamental album (guitars, drums, and bass, chorus-verse-chorus-that's all there), and viscerally, it's not too offensive.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Volume Two
    In his solo work, Ward's songs have exhibited a kind of arcane gritty lyricism: They're false museum pieces, revivifying old notions of garage-sale Americana, but they have heart and feel at least partially lived in. There's very little of that here, and though it's hard to hate Volume Two, it's also far too easy to forget it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Interpreting The Masters, Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall And John Oates
    For now, the musicianship is there, and I can't fault them their enthusiasm in the Hall & Oates back catalogue. It's just that Sara's smile gets lost in the interpretation.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Non Stop Erotik
    Explicitly ribald material, whether delivered with cheeky bombast ("When I Go Down on You") or the barely veiled lechery of the more sweetly inclined title track feel like unnecessary pushes into boldface territory.
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