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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Pale Emperor
    Whereas the Duke represented the pop icon's most aggressive experimentation with composition and style, Manson appears content simply to polish up the usual antisocial stompers.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Title
    This blue-eyed soul is ultimately just pale.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Better Tomorrow
    A Better Tomorrow mostly proves that, no matter what conflicts may be simmering, there's enough sustained talent at work here to keep the usual material feeling fresh. It's forays outside that established template that make for the worst moments.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The London Sessions
    It isn't more than the sum of its highlights, but on the surface, it's fun. Like a diary written in a bunch of different, eye-catching fonts.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four
    The album's irresistibly obvious choruses, hackneyed sentiments, and puppy-eyed earnestness can come off as endearing when the songwriting is clever enough, but every misstep is, despite the band's efforts to assert more control over their music, a painful reminder of One Direction's status as a manufactured, focus-grouped pop entity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ypres
    If the album means more in that context than it does outside it, the same could be said of the geographical significance of the historical tragedy it's memorializing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Broke With Expensive Taste
    "212" along with an upgraded version of Fantasea's "Luxury" are among the best songs here, but their inclusion is distracting, representing more unpursued directions for an artist who needs to be looking toward the future, not cramming in old material on an already overstuffed album, one which feels more like a drastically updated portfolio than a proper debut.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Favourite Faded Fantasy
    Bombast, buoyed by self-doubt, gets in the way of the finer sentiments, especially in the album's over-inflated middle. But subtle pleasures can still be found.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Motion
    Regrettably, such ear candy [like "Blame"] is few and far between.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Storytone
    Even though Storytone's gloppy Disney-movie strings and half-assed singing can be trying to sit through at times, the extent to which Young is willing to go to avoid resting on his laurels and making Even Longer After the Gold Rush is admirable. Namely, making an album that features almost none of the musical tropes listeners associate with Neil Young—or rock music in general.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    With a Little Help from My Fwends
    Most of the covers on With a Little Help from My Fwends don't aim for creative rearrangement; they tend more toward pointless sabotage.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    24 Karat Gold: Songs from the Vault
    Unfortunately, 24 Karat is stuffed with too many stately piano-and-guitar ballads that return to the same theme of bygone romance.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sweet Talker
    Unfortunately, after that impressive opening salvo ["Bang Bang"], the album largely relapses on tired MOR pop.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Aquarius
    Interludes were employed on Janet's best albums to segue between an array of themes, genres, and tempos; here they're just used as atmosphere, to create the illusion of an album that's larger than the sum of its parts.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wonder Where We Land
    ["New Dorp. New York"] lends a refreshing dose of personality to an album that's otherwise stoically straightfaced.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Our Love
    Snaith eventually does work his way out of the darkness, and while the consistent production value and a pair of vibrant, energetic closing tracks keep the album from feeling like a total wash, it's also an uncharacteristically uneven effort from a generally consistent artist.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Art Official Age
    Art Official Age's main takeaway is that His Royal Badness has started to make peace with being past his prime.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    JHUD
    While Pharrell provides the album's high and low points, other collaborators dish out a few forgettable pleasures.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cheek to Cheek
    Gaga comes off more as a dilettante than an aficionado on Cheek to Cheek.... Bennett doesn't fare a whole lot better, his otherwise charming performances strained throughout. The pair's solo efforts, particularly Gaga's clumsy interpretation of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and Bennett's surprisingly pitchy rendition of Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady," only serve to spotlight their shortcomings.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    X
    Aside from the standout club banger "Add Me In," which is steeped in arithmetic and trigonometry metaphors, and "101," which finds Brown doing "101 on the 101," the album's lyrics largely eschew mathematical objects in favor of soul-baring like "Autumn Leaves" and sex talk like "Songs on 12 Play," which likens a girl to a song from the titular R. Kelly album.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Songs of Innocence
    From the nails-on-a-chalkboard solo of "Sleep Like a Baby Tonight" to the whining guitar strains of "Every Breaking Wave," the Edge's melodies and atmospheric licks are the real star of the album, which is otherwise marred by the kind of slick MOR pablum that plagued the band's last few efforts.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Single Mothers
    Single Mothers is at its best when it's at its most deliberately spare.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ryan Adams
    He may have matured in the last 14 years, but there's no indication that's been good for his music, which on Ryan Adams feels lazier and more watered down than ever before.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crush Songs
    Boredom isn't the worst feeling an album can conjure; a sense of wasted opportunity and squandered potential is a wholly graver offense.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Seen It All: The Autobiography
    Seen It All doesn't show Jeezy evolving into anything he hasn't already been, but it does crystallize his place in the pop-rap pecking order.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Moonshine in the Trunk
    Moonshine in the Trunk is a mostly upbeat, feel-good summertime album that largely minimizes Paisley's tendency toward hokey power balladry and whatever the hell "Accidental Racist" is.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Everything
    Nothing else, however, on Grande's sophomore effort, My Everything, fulfills the promise of those two singles ["Problem" and "Bang Bang"].
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blacc Hollywood
    This sense of puzzled division remains the only really interesting thing about Blacc Hollywood, an album that's remarkable only as a ghostly portrait of a half-formed figure prowling the fringes of success.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Junto
    Even in their diminished current form, Basement Jaxx still have a facility for turning pure cheese--dusty pianos scales, boilerplate diva-soul squawking, and tacky synthetic brass sections with "Yamaha" stamped on the side--into unabashed cheesy fun.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I'm Not Bossy, I'm the Boss
    I'm Not Bossy is sonically diverse, but rarely do the songs give O'Connor the opportunity to flaunt her impressive vocal range or, aside from closer "Streetcars," explore the more intimate side of her still-striking voice.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Clear Lake Forest [EP]
    The previous six songs sounded like they were made by a group of guys who'd spent years absorbing the rock music of the '60s deeply into their bones. "Linda's Gone" feels like it was made for stoned 16 year olds who just discovered The Velvet Underground & Nico for the first time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Voyager
    Too many songs here feel slackly constructed, and the overall musical mood only rarely connects with its lyrical content, leaving The Voyager as a moderately successful testimonial effort.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trouble in Paradise
    When Trouble in Paradise loses its way, it's because Jackson has traded in her frigid allure and commanding bellicosity for frailty and soft-heartedness, sentiments she doesn't deliver with any sort of sincerity.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Yes!
    Unfortunately, his wide-lens worldview leaves Yes! feeling like the musical equivalent of a G-rated sitcom.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hard Believer
    Without enough concrete musical or lyrical details to anchor the album's songs, they occasionally become too abstract for their own good.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Trigga
    Trigga is otherwise designed like a Hollywood blockbuster: squandered talent, obvious themes, and fleeting moments of creative excellence that stick among the clichés.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Glitter
    While the album may have its flaws, it is for the most part a successful period piece that clearly displays Carey's appreciation for all that has come before her.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paula
    Robin Thicke texts his estranged wife, Paula Patton, in the music video for the pointedly titled "Get Her Back," the lead single from said album, Paula. "I don't care," she replies. And it's likely no one else will either.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    While(1<2)
    Repeating very simple, barely there melodies over spare arrangements and ghostly keys is fine when you're soundtracking a Michael Mann film, but it isn't enough to fill the long gaps between your club-crashers.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Animal Ambition: An Untamed Desire to Win
    While simple pleasures are about all Animal Ambition can offer, it at least presents them with listenable panache.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A.K.A.
    The album features more guest rappers than even her 2002 remix album, and the standout "Acting Like That," featuring the always reliable Iggy Azalea, is handily the hardest beat she's ever bought. Unfortunately, A.K.A. also includes a slew of midtempo ballads whose soaring hooks and slick production are wasted on Lopez's reedy voice.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Do It Again
    Röyksopp and Robyn share so much sonic DNA that their team-up is almost self-defeating, blurring the distinction between the two to the point where their respective quirks are essentially scratched in favor of a cohesive but far too clinical production.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Me. I Am Mariah... The Elusive Chanteuse
    Undisciplined R&B pastiches, however, the album has in spades, especially ones that hearken back to her own career.... With surprising internal logic, the album's two unabashedly uptempo ditties are also the forums for Mariah's most serious-minded performances.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Long Way To the Beginning
    A Long Way to the Beginning thus finds the young upstart at a crossroads, between overt legacy mining and striking out on his own, a tentatively successful effort that at least demonstrates Seun's innate skills as a bandleader and a radical.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ghost Stories
    Although incumbent on its source material, Ghost Stories avoids wholly rote repetition by porting a modicum of the strangeness and innovation of other artists into its own body, despite Martin's clunky writing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Upside Down Mountain
    It's a testament to Oberst's enduring versatility that Upside Down Mountain can accommodate the antic creepiness of "Governor's Ball" as well as the transcendent uplift of "Time Forgot," but the album's moments of sentimentality make Oberst sound like just another chart-climbing purveyor of feel-good folky schlock.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unrepentant Geraldines
    If Unrepentant Geraldines is indeed visual art, it's more of a polite Norman Rockwell than a vomit-stained Sherman. The former goes great with dinner, but I await the gastric upset of the latter.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Xscape
    In the end, Xscape justifies its existence with a handful of potential singles that stand up to Jacko's peerless oeuvre, all of them about love's delirious power.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shine On
    On "Surrender and Certainty" and "Song for My Father," which is surprisingly less saccharine than you might expect, it at least starts to feel like she's evolving as an artist. But those moments are few and far between on an album that feels longer than it is, which, I guess, is a desirable quality for what is basically glorified background music.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Someday World
    Someday World never devolves into Tin Machine-style disaster, but it rarely manages to realize its collaborative potential either.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everyday Robots
    There's nothing inherently wrong with bemoaning cultural change (it's a better thematic analogue for personal detachment than the isolation of being rich and famous, at least), but Everyday Robots employs a scolding tone that doesn't help sugarcoat its cranky message.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Food
    This is some of Kelis's subtlest, most organic-sounding work. If only there was more of her in it.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The New Classic
    The New Classic mistakenly tries to frame Azalea as hip-hop's newest can't-miss egomaniac, focusing on the riches instead of the far more interesting rags.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Caves
    Her guitar playing, formerly at the top of the mix, gets manipulated and diminished; too often Caves finds the small-voiced singer dwarfed by her own overwhelming backdrops. Of the different varieties of sophomore slumphood, this at least falls into the more interesting category.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett
    Cautionary Tales is underwhelming, but it's also a victim of context.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hendra
    Hendra is such an impressively executed time capsule that it contains not only all of the pleasantries of the genre, but also its excessive earnestness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music for Robots [EP]
    On record it mostly reads as another dry intellectual exercise by a man whose career has become cluttered with them.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Future's Void
    What's most disappointing of all about The Future's Void is that, for all its heady ideas and pretty moments, in almost all ways it's a regression from Anderson's earlier work, a mishmash of half-completed thoughts that fails to ever fully connect.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Supermodel
    Had Supermodel ended with this potent one-two punch, one might be inclined to view the rest more charitably. Sadly, it finishes with two bits of acoustic muzak ("Fire Escape" and "Goats in Trees") and a bid to beat Imagine Dragons at its own game with the kind of frantic Meatloaf-goes-electronica favored in YA-movie soundtracks.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Soul of All Natural Things
    The album would have benefited from playing on that edge; instead, it rests on the laurels of its earthy prettiness.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lightning Bolt
    Years removed from the raw emotion and desperate appetites of youth, Pearl Jam has slipped into alt-rock elder statesmanship as one would a comfortable old sweater. And as Lightning Bolt mostly attests, it's a decent look for them.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wishbone
    She's a prop to this glittering material, only nominally more prominent than the music that backs her, and that lack of a defining voice is a major problem for an album that floats by like a pleasant dream.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Closer to the Truth
    It's with some disappointment, but not much surprise, to discover that the singer's 26th studio album, Closer to the Truth, not only perpetuates this exhausted (and exhausting) formula, but fails to attempt to reinvent it in even the most minute ways.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Name Is My Name
    Like any rapper, Pusha is still heavily dependent on the talent surrounding him, and these connections keep things on an even keel, with mostly strong production work presented throughout.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2
    Ultimately, 2 of 2 doesn't so much eclipse its predecessor as it settles into the format more believably.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Circles Super Bon Bon Sleepless How Many Cans? True Dreams of Wichita Monster Man Mr. Bitterness Maybe I’ll Come Down St. Louise Is Listening I Miss t
    Everything Soul Coughing once made darkly curious and subversive has become predictably benign, but despite its affability, Circles Super Bon Bon... can't quite shake the obvious negativity of its creator, who seems far more interested in tearing down the old rather than building something new, rendering the album a completely superfluous labor of hatred.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bones of What You Believe
    While the album has its fair share of sweet spots, the handful of capable melodies never quite balances out its bizarre impulses or the utter lack of thematic unity.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Maybach Music Group Presents: Self Made, Vol. 3
    Perhaps just a little more scattered and weak than the previous two installments, the Rick Ross-governed Self Made, Vol. 3 achieves little out of the ordinary, while providing a few solid tracks that stand out from the general unevenness on display.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ski Mask
    Perhaps Ski Mask's greatest virtue is that it demonstrates Islands' competency as a conventional rock act while dropping the occasional winking reminder that the band hasn't lost their ability to get weird.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Defend Yourself
    Defend Yourself still suggests a creator with an obsessively huge record collection, only the heady variation of explored genres seems more boilerplate, a sense of variety for variety's sake rather than a desire to put a unique stamp on old musical tropes.
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