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
    • 40 Critic Score
    Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
    On Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, however, Banhart comes across as an attention whore; the mannered, look-what-I-can-do kook act overshadows his actual talent.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rapprocher
    Underneath the litany of angular instrumentation, Rapprocher is, both musically and narratively, conventional glam-pop fare, but it's difficult not to admire how well the bedazzled glove fits.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sunday At Devil Dirt
    The lyrics are competent, the posturing never feels too artificial, and Lanegan's gruff rasp and Campbell's airy voice blend together like a well-made cup of coffee.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Light the Horizon
    This is a solid album with a truly woeful centerpiece.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nightlife
    However unfairly, the rest of Nightlife doesn't quite meet those lofty heights [of "Don't Move"].
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boatlift
    For better or worse, the story of Boatlift concerns more the production and song structures than Pitbull's own rapping.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Too Young to Be in Love
    Between the camping, the re-contextualizing, the endless musical cut-n'-paste, Hunx and His Punx throw up a lot of barriers between their listener and any kind of un-self-conscious appreciation of their songs.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hillbilly Bone [EP]
    To Shelton's credit, he seems to have taken a cue from his girlfriend, Miranda Lambert, on how to consider the overall thematic coherence of an album: Even the weaker songs on the record include some details of rural living and a genuine wittiness that attempt to put some meat on this Bone.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ambition
    Lloyd's chorus on "Sabotage" is easily the most immediately engaging portion of the album (it's actually quite a lot better than most of the material on his own overpraised King of Hearts), but the brunt of Ambition is as forgettable as big-budget rap gets.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pythons
    Pythons is less dynamic than its predecessor, with fewer chord changes and less overall complexity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Showtunes
    There can be too much of a good thing, and making your way through all 26 tracks of Showtunes will definitely leave you with a tummy ache.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dystopia
    On the epic title track and vampy “Bullet to the Brain,” the approach yields sturdy tunes. Elsewhere, Dystopia is marred by repetitive phrasing and turgid hooks; the riffs here are high volume, low value.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    When You See Yourself
    With the band’s musicianship in peak form, it’s Caleb’s songwriting that limits the album’s impact. Marriage and fatherhood have expanded his inner monologue beyond fratboy misogyny and rock-star posturing. But he still doesn’t have much of interest to say.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Corinne Bailey Rae
    Rae's amiable competence marks her as a talent worth keeping tabs on, but the strength of Corinne Bailey Rae is fleeting, a triumph of mood over tangible substance.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wu Block
    So while Ghostface and Louch gel nicely as partners, neither pushes the other toward any standard of greatness or progress.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Woman Worldwide
    At 16 tracks, Woman Worldwide at times feels like an inexplicable rehash of existing material--a time-filler while Justice plots their next studio reinvention.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pete Yorn
    While that may not necessarily make Yorn any more distinctive on this album than on any of his previous efforts, Black's energy at least gives him more of an edge than the singer-songwriter has been known for in the past.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mind of Mine
    The lyrics throughout Mind of Mine are similarly by-the-numbers pop-R&B: pleasure-obsessed, vaguely misogynist, and largely disposable. By the album's midpoint, Malik's playboy shtick starts to outstay its welcome.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ready For The Flood
    If there's nothing particularly innovative about Flood, it's nonetheless gratifying to hear Olson and Louris writing and performing together again, and hopefully the album is but a starting point for future projects.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Which Side Are You On?
    DiFranco's sincerity is never in question, but on Which Side Are You On?, the candor simply serves her better on her intimate, personal songs than on a set of political songs that are uncharacteristically dated.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Do It!
    After five albums in just eight years, you could accuse Clinic of being one-note, but in an indie world besotted with cheap revivalism, at least you can't call them a gimmick.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Excerpts From The Diary Of Todd Zilla [EP]
    More difficult to embrace than earlier Grandaddy releases.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    White Lies For Dark Times
    The lack of originality on White Lies for Dark Times is a major hindrance, but the execution of these stylistic pastiches by Harper and Relentless7 is so dead-on that it's easy to appreciate the record on its own modest terms.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Disconnect from Desire
    It's not that the band sounds exactly like Stereolab, or like anyone else, but listening to Disconnect from Desire feels like shuffling through a '90s alt-rock playlist.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Freedom
    It's too bad the songwriting doesn't match the ambition.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Best Friend Is You
    Nash is at her best when she brings that vicious bite into what might otherwise sound like a pop trifle....When she rebels a bit too aggressively against pop conventions, though, Nash gets herself into trouble.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Both Sides Of The Gun
    While his ambition on Both Sides Of The Gun is just another of Harper's many likable qualities, ambition alone doesn't make the kind of statement that the album's scope and structure demands.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Holy Ghost!
    Hat-tips and insider references abound on Holy Ghost!, but what's communicated most strongly isn't, ultimately, the duo's abiding love for new wave and disco, or even the timelessness of the style, but rather the poverty of nostalgia as an aesthetic principle.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Sleep & a Forgetting
    This is mildly composed, generally genial pop, with a few good hooks and ideas scattered throughout.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Caer
    Though much of the rest of Caer is mopey and monochromatic, these songs ["Too Many Colors" and "Little Woman"] suggest new possibilities for Twin Shadow's next phase.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Remember Me
    The sense that Hudson's singularity was lost on the I Remember Me team is reinforced by the fact that we've heard almost all of these songs before.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dying To Say This To You
    Slick and propulsive, the quintet needs a little meat on their songs to help elevate their slavish '80s enthusiasm into something a little more memorable.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Courage
    In terms of both its length and themes, the 20-track Courage can feel exhausting, alternating between platitudes about grief and self-empowerment that, with only a few exceptions, make what should feel cathartic sound empty and even anonymous.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blue Songs
    what's missing is that nagging vocal that hovers somewhere between sublime and corrosive, as so many of the great performances in dance music have.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Somewhere Else
    Nothing on the album is overtly bad (except for the goofy blather of "Starman," notably the only upbeat love song on the album) and some of it is actually good (the wailing saxophone of "Sundown" is ghostly and surprising), but what does it offer other than comfort and familiarity?
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pink Friday
    It's this seeming lack of confidence, contradictory to the poise she shows elsewhere, which identifies the problems with Pink Friday, an often wobbly first effort that shows enormous promise.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Steel Magnolia
    As co-writers of seven of the album's 12 songs, Jones and Linsey can be blamed for the weak material.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Biasonic Hotsauce: Birth of the Nanocloud
    Biasonic Hotsauce peaks far too early.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Li(f)e
    Splashed with the marks of two styles veritably at odds with each other, Li(f)e is a messy example of creative head-butting resulting in a conflicted whimper of an album.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young & Old
    The problem is, even at their best, Tennis's music seems inconsequential and frankly, neutered.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Game of Monogamy
    It's at times shocking how off-key the album actually is. The music switches between dry and histrionic. The lyrics are flat and repetitive.
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gravity the Seducer
    Gravity the Seducer is by some measure more focused than Ladytron's previous efforts. Or a little more fatigued. It's sometimes a little hard to tell when the music is so resolutely detached and android-vague.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Broken Hymns, Limbs, And Skin
    Except for a few slow numbers, which drag as the band overestimates the charm of their shtick, Broken Hymns works consistently, distracting from the staleness of its themes by burning them from the ground up.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    DSVII
    DSVII is an undeniably florid soundscape of ‘80s pop culture touchstones. But hearing Gonzalez flesh these castoffs out into full songs through the lens of video game music feels like little more than an amusing experiment.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sky Full of Holes
    The juvenile wordplays, ironic pop-culture references, and narratives about sad-sack folks undone by mundane, everyday minutia that are among the band's trademarks remain fully intact: The content of the songs on Sky Full of Holes is, by and large, as wry and idiosyncratic as their songs have ever been.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In the Rainbow Rain
    With the exception of “Famous Tracheotomies,” Sheff often struggles to find compelling metaphors on this album.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Midwinter Graces
    As a subversion of religious themes, Midwinter misses the mark entirely; as a traditional holiday album courtesy of one of Christianity's most astute pop cultural critics, it's an ironic, pleasantly competent oddity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Motordrome
    When Ørsted ramps up the bombast, Motordrome reaches a serviceable level of pop pageantry. But most of the singer’s cooed melodies feel comparatively half-hearted. Ultimately, the album has a way of getting your attention and failing to keep it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mind Chaos
    It's the enthusiasm of the performances that makes Mind Chaos work, but the fact that it's always dialed up so high also works against the album, as though Hockey is insisting a bit too much that they're fun.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gold Dust
    Unfortunately, the remainder of the tracks on Gold Dust simply aren't significantly better or worse than they were in their original forms.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Charleston, SC 1966
    It's hard to imagine that Charleston, SC 1966 won't continue Rucker's hot streak within the country genre, even if the album suggests that he's content to follow the genre's trends rather than set them.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Versatile
    It's disappointing to hear one of the all-time great vocalists turn in such mundane performances.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Gift & a Curse
    Considering that many of Gunna’s past projects have been largely defined by their star power, their total absence here results in a back-to-basics album with a healthy amount of breathing room, one that’s able to showcase Gunna’s own talents with an unusual amount of clarity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Para Mi
    Though the better part of Para Mi was ostensibly written with romantic interests in mind, the songs, so anchored to fixed experiences, have come to represent universal lessons learned. They’re still rough around the edges—many lack dynamism, fading in and out of monochrome synth passages—but the impression that Cuco put all of himself into the music remains.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jojo Burger Tempest
    Caught somewhere between dream-pop banality one moment and pleasant, expertly crafted distraction the next, this overstuffed album is perhaps not nearly as poor as its title choice would suggest, but it's still in need of some generous paring.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MAYA
    It may be an above-average album, but its aesthetic matches her persona only at its shallowest levels, in the thinness of its ideas and the often-forceful ugliness of its message.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    19
    Critics have favorably compared Adele to Amy Winehouse, but most of 19 plays like the quieter moments on Kate Nash's "Made of Bricks;" the production is largely simple and organic, wisely showcasing Adele's voice, which is appropriately soulful and imperfect.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All Across This Land
    Singer-songwriter Eric Earley falls back on more subdued, and largely more generic, folksy Neil Young/Bob Dylanisms.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Face Control
    Fans of off-kilter pop will enjoy at least a few of the stronger cuts, but too much of Face Control sounds like the unfinished blueprint of a much better album.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Defying Gravity
    So much of the album feels so deliberately tasteful and conservative. Defying Gravity barely gets off the ground.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Invented
    Invented doesn't entirely lose those attributes that make Jimmy Eat World such a doggedly likable band, but it struggles to know what happens when emo kids get over it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cruel Summer
    Cruel Summer isn't a Kanye album per se, but even as a high-pedigree compilation, it still falls flat.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    JHUD
    While Pharrell provides the album's high and low points, other collaborators dish out a few forgettable pleasures.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Welcome 2 Collegrove
    In the end, this is a dramatically uneven project that demonstrates its creators’ unwillingness to grow up and, more damningly, their inability to conceive of a concept and see it through.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four
    Though Four does contain some sweet spots, it's largely an exercise in throwing projectiles at the proverbial wall with the hopes that something, anything, will stick. Four is a vacant display of miscellany.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Crime Pays
    This material is so intermittently successful because the rapper is as much of a clown as he is an MC, a duality which assures that his albums will always be tinged with the bittersweet fruits of this twisted sensibility.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Living Thing
    In addition to a deficiency of hooks, Living Thing is further crippled by an all too obvious absence of charm.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Songs From a Zulu Farm
    Its intentions are clearly wholesome, the music is sweet and cordial, and it's impossible to tell whether its ultimate drabness is the group's fault or our own.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Americana
    In attempting to honor the sounds of the past, Young ends up turning them into toxic sludge.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Surfing the Void
    Yet whereas Myths of the Near Future was often psychotically fun, Surfing the Void finds Klaxons taking their genre rock shtick way too seriously.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Theater Of The Mind
    Luda has suggested he wanted this album to have a cinematic through line, maybe in order to consolidate his diversified media representations, but Theater doesn't cohere in a manner that would satisfy anyone short of Paul Haggis, or anyone who has listened to an album by Prince Paul or Madvillain, for that matter.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Tourist
    The Tourist is a welcome shift from the amorphous electronica of the band’s last effort, but the haphazard pacing and overreliance on platitudes and generalizations prevent the album from fully achieving the emotional potency aimed for by Ounsworth’s trembling voice.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Believe
    Though his new voice has the rambunctiousness that pubescence assumes, it's also marked with the timorousness that's less often celebrated, but equally omnipresent among vocalists trying to figure out the limits of their new range.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hands
    While her first full-length album, Hands, smacks of trying too hard (Hesketh skittishly rotated through several different producers, and the sound is all over the map), most of the songs are imminently playable on their own terms.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Songs Of Mass Destruction
    Mass Destruction is Lennox's first album largely recorded in the U.S. (Los Angeles and Miami, as opposed to just London), giving the songs a slightly less chilly quality and a bigger, more expansive sound, but it's still a disappointment in the same way the Eurythmics' rock-leaning "Be Yourself Tonight" likely was to fans of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" and "Touch."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Century Of Self
    Century of Self is at times a stirring, effective rock album, familiar but stable, but the band's general creativity is less vital than they think, and rather than settle down they continue a fussy streak of projects loaded with hollow, stilted ambition.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hurley
    Hurley, named after the tragicomic Lost character (who also adorns the cover), continues this recent trend with no less than nine co-writers (for 10 songs), and an even longer list of featured musicians, including Michael Cera, who is enlisted to lay down some mandolin and harmonies for no discernible reason beyond his being Michael Cera.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zig
    Aside from the disco-fied “Motorbike,” inspired by Jack Cardiff’s 1968 drama The Girl on a Motorcycle, most of Zig takes few such risks. As a result, Poppy has become what she’s successfully evaded up to this point: predictable.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    True Sadness
    While the experiments in modern techniques here vary in effectiveness, they at least spur the band to capture the spontaneity and jubilance of their often rapturous live shows--a spirit that often gets lost when they pack their albums with painfully sincere, stone-faced balladry. In fact, it's when the Avetts lean back on their standard neo-bluegrass style that True Sadness is at its dullest.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    One Of The Boys
    While One Of The Boys isn't a good country album by any stretch, it also isn't offensive or reductive in any of the ways that made her two prior albums such problems.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Comedown Machine
    Comedown Machine remains a pretty good album, possibly the least characteristic thing they've released to date.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Understanding
    Even the best tracks bobble like a helium balloon tugging from a child's clenched fist... but not quite forcibly enough to pull free.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Good Time
    Good Time, however, too often finds Jackson adopting unfortunate trends in modern country music in place of the thoughtful songwriting that characterizes his earlier work.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Man Of Aran OST
    As a soundtrack, it works (mostly) well, but as a standalone album, it feels drearily wan and insignificant.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dos!
    While the album is agreeably jejune in a way that recalls the band's Dookie era, only a handful of its tracks are truly essential additions to the Green Day catalogue.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love at the Bottom of the Sea
    There's still a feeling of something missing here, and while the material is much stronger than on the band's most recent releases, there's also a sense that these are the first 15 songs Merritt wrote for the project and not the best of a larger selection.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gloria
    For as much as Smith tries to step out of the box, they still sound most comfortable playing to their previously established strengths.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go
    The whole album is relentlessly gloomy, comparable to the general glumness of a Xiu Xiu record but without the fun of a WTF factor.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky
    As it stands, Blue Colour is no more than a better-than-average paean to '80s-era Prince by a band that has yet to find its voice.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Starboy
    He remains an exceptionally talented vocalist, yet none of the many studio wizards represented in the album's by-committee structure is capable of wrenching him out of his usual morose rhythms. To be fair, none of them really try, playing to his basic talents while also coddling his laziest inclinations, swaddling songs in scintillating soundscapes that coat these sour centers in layers of sweetness.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kingdom Come
    If all of Jigga's future records sound as labored and flat as Kingdom Come, do we really need him back?
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Volume 3
    Each song is winsome enough, but rarely does a track distinguish itself from the easy, revivalist indie-swing of the whole.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rebel Soul
    It's a very safe affair, full of platitudes and conspicuous all-American gestures.
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