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
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fragrant World
    The band's tendency to overreach may be muted on Fragrant World, but Yeasayer is still as earnestly silly as ever.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lightbulbs
    Lightbulbs is an album solely for the initiated, and newcomers to Fujiya & Miyagi would be better served by skipping this watered-down amalgamation and checking out the band's influences instead.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Afraid of Heights
    More often than not, Afraid of Heights points to a set of punk-rock signifiers rather than thoughtfully engaging with them.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Further
    Further is by definition not the most embarrassing music of their career--merely the most boring.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heroes
    Inconsistency and lack of focus mars Heroes, which relies too heavily on misguided collaborations that don't add anything of value to the album.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs Of Desire
    Though doubtful it was crafted for such a purpose, Eels's latest is simply not much beyond a forgettable earful for a lazy Sunday listen.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Not Music
    It's an aspect of the band that surely deserves recognition, and Not Music, uneven and understated, is its fitting epitaph.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Party Store
    If the band is innately familiar with the rules of this kind of territory, they sound completely out of their depth in other attempts.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Strangers to Ourselves
    Flashes of contingent weirdness appear throughout the album, and the lyrics remain reliably sardonic, but the band surrenders too often to a prefab pop-rock idiom that isn't entirely their own.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mean Old Man
    Mean Old Man may be a fundamentally lazy album, but it works in the right places, making sharp choices and offering a mostly agreeable experience.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blown Away
    Although the album is still a far cry from being great on its own merits or from being a fully realized, well-calibrated statement of artistic identity, it's nonetheless a welcome surprise to hear Underwood finally making some substantive headway toward recording music that aspires to be more than merely pleasant and safe.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Woodstock
    Instead of putting their own offbeat stamp on danceable pop music, Portugal. The Man abandons their once-unique sound and retreats into imitation.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pigeons
    Pigeons may be the better album, but it still feels hollow, ringing with the sound of a band accepting their own shortcomings.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Funk Wav Bounces, Vol. 1
    By showing little interest in challenging the clichés of men fixated on conquest and status symbols and women focused on “feels,” Harris undermines what could have been an inspired creative reinvention.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Five Ghosts
    The formula works better elsewhere (see the perky, airy single "Fixed"), but like the adolescent musings that serve as its inspiration, The Five Ghosts is, at best, awkwardly sweet and, at worst, fumbling and tone-deaf.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Casablanca Nights
    There's a hell of a lot of air amid Casablanca Nights's piecemeal, electronically transferred elements. Just not much oxygen.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    King Animal
    The album is less a triumphant return than an example of what happens to most middle-aged rock bands: They've returned as a slightly more conservative version of what made them famous in the first place.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stone Temple Pilots
    It's not groundbreaking stuff, but it surpasses all expectations for a group who've spent almost a decade apart.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    21st Century Breakdown
    Maybe if you've heard one Green Day rock opera, you've heard them all. Anyone who owns American Idiot probably won't need its lesser twin, and those who steered clear won't come groveling for forgiveness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mechanize
    Fear Factory has always been most appealing as a thinking man's metal act, and if Mechanize largely dials down the thinking in order to ratchet up the metal, its final act suggests that a better balance is within the band's reach.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wild and Free
    For his latest release, Wild and Free, he rarely feels the need to stray outside this tried and tested outline: Each track bounces along with a carefree groove and exudes blissful vibes without really offering anything fresh or innovative, but is there really any new ground to break in a genre that reached its creative zenith over 30 years ago?
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Icarus Falls
    Across 27 tracks, he tries on so many guises--melancholic balladeer, unabashed chart-chaser, avant-pop visionary--that he fails to ever separate himself from his peers, rendering Icarus Falls a forgettable, albeit expertly produced, travelogue of R&B trends.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unorthodox Jukebox
    While not an unqualified triumph, Unorthodox Jukebox is a step forward.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Free To Stay
    An arresting collection... The only real criticism you can level at the sisters is that about halfway through the album, everything begins to sound the same.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Long Wave
    Love songs and brazen nostalgia are the album's bread and butter, and it's hard not to be drawn in by the comfort of Lynne's layer upon layer of pleasant melodic attention.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kelis Was Here
    Kelis Was Here sounds like a talented, left-field hip-hop diva in a holding pattern, concerned about her legacy but uncertain as to how to go about cementing it.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett
    Cautionary Tales is underwhelming, but it's also a victim of context.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mother
    However welcome it may be to hear her voice again, it's ultimately her decision to play things so safe that keeps Mother from being a wholly satisfying return.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Indigo
    More complex ruminations are few and far between, with Tatum too often getting bogged down in generic binaries, from the fire and rain dichotomy on “Canyon on Fire” to a fickle romantic partner always “pulling me close” and “pushing me back” on “Oscillation.” Delivered with Tatum's vocals so prominent in the mix, these trite lyrical moments blemish Indigo's otherwise pristine musicality.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Queen
    Minaj is obviously capable of backing up all the posturing. ... But Queen also finds Minaj falling back on some frustratingly familiar shortcomings. The album loses its momentum whenever it aims for the pop charts.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Daydreams & Nightmares
    Daydreams & Nightmares may be pleasant enough for an afternoon diversion, but it's essentially nondescript, generic indie-pop, of which no amount of charisma from Jonsson can possibly mask.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alpinisms
    The dual harmonies and inherently hypnotic cadences render music that is largely exhilarating occasionally monotonous.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In Our Bedroom After The War
    'The Night Starts Here' is the kind of boy-girl baton-song that's become a signature for the band, with Campbell and Millan trading verses while we play analysts, and though this one is sufficiently cinematic and electro-psychedelic, it's not quite 'Your Ex-Lover is Dead.'
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Matters Most
    Unfortunately, the song [“Clouds with Ellipses”], like so much of What Matters Most, lacks the snark and self-aggrandizing pity that made the singer-songwriter’s early albums, like Rockin’ the Suburbs, so relatable.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fever Dream
    The fireside warmth that made songs like “Dirty Paws” and “Human” feel so intimate has dissipated in favor of squeaky-clean production, leaving the album feeling generic and non-specific.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    24K Magic
    The album features the strongest set of beats and rhythmic hooks in Mars's canon to date, making it a could-be heir to gratuitous groove records like 1999, Off the Wall, and Remain in Light--if only it were as innovative. Ultimately, the album's magic is a trick everyone already knows.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scarlet
    Doja’s patently irreverent musings on these topics are diverting and humorous, but they’re not served by being presented in such self-serious stylistic trappings. As a result, the album winds up being an uneven grab bag of tracks that aspire to high-brow West Coast rap and down-the-middle pop—the work of a talented MC in search of the right tonal balance.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I'm Not Dead
    Pink's rhymes still rely too heavily on adolescent clichés and there's an air of contrived confessionalism throughout the album.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where You Stand
    Though Where You Stand, their first album in five years, doesn't scale quite the same heights [as 1999's The Man Who]", there's real beauty in it too.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    TM:103 Hustlerz Ambition
    Unfortunately, he sounds far less in command on most of TM:103, never lost, but rarely entirely at home.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Memoirs Of An Imperfect Angel
    Mariah is in fine voice throughout the album, and there are plenty of inspired moments to be found....Which makes it all the more disappointing that the album's final stretch devolves into a mess of old-school Mariah rehashes that should have been left in the past.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Long Player Late Bloomer
    On his previous albums, Sexsmith's choices of producers haven't always played to his strengths, but Rock's light hand makes Long Player Late Bloomer the best sounding record in Sexsmith's extensive catalogue.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Serpentina
    Though she once again flashes her talent for delivering emotionally wrought tales of heartbreak, Serpentina asserts its uniqueness in paradoxically conventional and unsurprising ways.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Record Collection
    Three albums in, it's hard to imagine a Mark Ronson album not brimming over with a crowd-pleasing, inter-genre collection of guest stars.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Both Sides of the Sky
    While none of it is of the caliber of the music he released in his lifetime, the album includes material from some of the last studio sessions by the Experience and the earliest by Hendrix's final outfit, Band of Gypsys, offering a glimpse at a transitional phase in his work.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The North
    The North's ultimate undoing isn't that it exudes so much schmaltziness, but that it sounds awkwardly and almost unconsciously dated, similar to the most recent offerings from indie-pop rockers Minus the Bear and Cold War.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Night of Hunters
    Night of Hunters is a beautiful, smart record, but it's also, by design, an obtuse and insular album by an artist who already skews pretty far in those directions.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    World Wide Pop
    Ultimately, World Wide Pop succumbs to sameiness, with several songs in a row set to a similarly frantic tempo and overly compressed, treble-heavy sound mix. Rather than allowing individual sounds to stand out, the chaotic placement of samples makes them all run together.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Former Lives
    What's most frustrating about Former Lives is that for every single shining moment there are two or three that subsequently fall flat.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wolf
    While Wolf definitely feels like progress on some fronts, it's also a resolutely conservative effort, marred by a neurotic sense of self-involvement that recalls Eminem at his worst.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Touch
    The influence of Beyoncé's massive hit "Crazy In Love" is all over Amerie's sophomore effort.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon
    On the whole, in broadening his music’s scope, those responsible for piecing together Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon have lost sight of the local specificity, quirky charisma, and energy that made a name for Pop Smoke in the first place.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Only Built for Infinity Links
    In the absence of Offset, Quavo and Takeoff still adhere to a strict hierarchy of talent: Predictably, the former remains at the top, singing the vast majority of the album’s hooks and leading nearly every song.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All Birds Say
    All Birds Say is worn down by its sluggishness and suffers overall from a surfeit of ineffectual good humor.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Countrypolitan Duets
    When the album is less successful, it's generally because her collaborators let her down or because she's played it too safe and too deliberately tasteful.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beneath the Eyrie
    Too often, Beneath the Eyrie sounds like other artists, which is especially disappointing for a group like the Pixies, who have always been more trendsetters than followers.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pretty.Odd.
    Every song on Pretty. Odd. is played and sung with the exuberant delivery of Rent on Broadway. But when the hooks are this good, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hippies
    In some ways Hippies recalls the bare, unassuming simplicity of three-chord punk by groups like the Ramones, and while it never attains that level of near-mindless glee, its haphazard mashing of styles creates an infectious if transient blend of songs.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Rosegold
    That lack of lyrical substance isn’t a problem just because we expect more from a songwriter with as compelling a discography as Monroe’s, but because the album’s production—crisp and bright but mostly two dimensional—isn’t interesting enough to carry the songs.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pink Friday 2
    Despite some catchy moments, there’s almost nothing about Pink Friday 2 that makes it stand out from the current slate of pop and rap music. Unlike its predecessor, the album doesn’t leave much of an impression, and certainly won’t reshape the hip-hop landscape.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ms. Kelly
    This time around, both the production and lyrics are stronger.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All I Ever Wanted
    Taken in isolation and out of the context of the album as a whole--say, on the radio--nearly all of these songs work well enough, despite the production choices that don't always play to Clarkson's strengths and which draw too much attention to themselves.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The People's Key
    This overflowing sense of self has done more to define Oberst than anything else, and it continues on The People's Key, spilling into the contemporary malaise he invokes and the often brilliant poetic associations of which he's sometimes capable.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sounds Of The Universe
    They might not be affecting musical culture the way they did in their prime, but at least half of their latest effort is as strong as anything they've written.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tomorrow Morning
    In stark contrast to its title, Tomorrow Morning is dull, dark, and hopeless.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In My Own Words
    In My Own Words might pale next to Legend's stellar debut, but, even at its Robert Kelly worst, it's not hateable.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Exclusive
    There's still nothing very "exclusive" about Exclusive at all.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Inner Mansions
    Watered down and indistinct, The Inner Mansions falls into the same trap as Toro y Moi's Underneath the Pine and many other chillwave releases: Namely, that it's essentially a too-familiar collage of Holga-kissed sentimentality, running through its nostalgic musical cues like a mindless carousel slide projector.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Girl on Fire
    Girl on Fire is less a portrait of Keys's womanhood at a crossroads as it is another extension of a career spent predominantly navigating straight down the middle of the road.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Something To Tell You
    These 11 slickly produced tracks are kept more uniform in tone and content, to the point of repetition, and the feelings expressed sound more manufactured than genuine.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Music For Men
    It's hard to hear Men as anything but a letdown, the sound of a genuinely talented band struggling to take the proverbial next step.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    3121
    While the hooks don't reach out and grab you the way you long for them to, and though the lyrics aren't as smart as we've come to expect from a composer who once claimed to literally write songs in his sleep, 3121 is a wholly listenable and consistent(ly funky) addition to the catalog of one of music's pop pioneers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    First Impressions Of Earth
    First Impressions introduces some subtle new colors to the band's musical palette... but the pervasive sense of inert boredom, which has been noted as a strength in the past, is difficult to shake.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Intimacy
    Bloc Party disavows their history and start at a musical Year Zero. But the band hasn't adequately replaced their former selves to justify jettisoning their pervious strengths.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Neighborhoods
    It's admirable that Blink-182 tries to challenge themselves over the course of Neighborhoods, but their growing pains don't make for a particularly good album or a welcome comeback.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cherry Bomb
    Tyler makes a few more gestures toward maturity, cutting down the lengthy screeds and striking a better overall balance between sweetness and horror. But he continues to struggle to integrate his feelings into his material.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Infinite Arms
    Infinite Arms is a surprisingly understated affair.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scars
    Scars is a peculiarly irritating sort of failure. It's an overachieving, overqualified failure.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Summer Of Hate
    At times they recall labelmates Wavves, short of their devotion to fuzzy landscapes--another sonic comparison for an album that recalls the messy disorder of a tipped-over jukebox.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hush
    Overall Hush feels like a duller version of its predecessor--its skies clearer, its horizons broader, an expansiveness that makes it feel all the more depleted.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Street of the Love of Days
    It's hard to get excited about any of the music on Street of the Love of Days-not because it isn't well made, but because there's no real hook to it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Freeze, Melt
    The result is an album that appears caught between modes, playfully riding cascading synths even as it lyrically subsumes itself in dourness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Camp
    The overall result is a messy jumble that, in its inability to find a consistent tone, ends up in a place that hasn't really been explored before.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Exotic Birds Of Prey
    At just seven tracks, the album proves to be paradoxically sparse in its loose, leisurely construction but dense in its intense inscrutability. Exotic Birds of Prey’s resistance to form, accessibility, and interpretation will either draw you in or push you away—and that’s probably the point.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    News from Nowhere
    Offering the same level of meticulousness as North isn't quite good enough for News from Nowhere, which serves up a wonderfully lush but ultimately rudderless slice of droning electronica that's much too imitative to be anything other than a pleasant distraction.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sweetheart of the Sun
    While it may not be as perfect a pop album as All Over the Place or Different Light, the Bangles get an awful lot right on Sweetheart of the Sun.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    I'll Be Your Girl
    The eight-minute, two-part “Rusalka, Rusalka/Wild Rushes” stands in stark contrast to the rest of the album in almost every way. ... By comparison, the rest of I'll Be Your Girl feels painfully half-baked.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Stand Still, Look Pretty
    Really, all there is to be said about The Wreckers is that, in playing country star dress-up, they're reasonably pleasant and inoffensive, which puts them a bit ahead of a good deal of what's currently popular in country music.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lady Antebellum
    There's nothing revolutionary here, just a solid set of songs performed with definite skill and enthusiasm.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In the Time of Gods
    What In the Time of Gods lacks, then, is a balance between the headier material and the wit and frivolity that have made Williams such a distinctive voice in contemporary folk.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dreams and Nightmares
    The problem is that this pronounced personal narrative frequently buts up against the album's upper-crust trappings.... Still, Dreams and Nightmares delivers a few standout tracks and a ringing confirmation of the rapper's skills.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Beautiful
    Anyone introduced to her through Beautiful would be hard-pressed to figure out what all the fuss is about, since it reflects neither the vocal virtuosity nor the wide-ranging musical adventurousness of her best work
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    1989
    Most of 1989 is much denser, without betraying Adams's inherent aesthetic.... Unfortunately, there are nearly as many misfires on 1989 as there are successful experiments.
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