Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,118 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: 1,688 out of 3118
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3118
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3118
3118 music reviews
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    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fellow Travelers
    The album still has an intimate feel to it, like a missive to those other bands trudging the tour circuit, and it's an ambitious one that invites listeners to travel along.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crimes of Passion
    While the album is the closest Crocodiles have come to achieving their own unique brand of tuneful clamor, there's still a sense that they can't quite move away from the blueprint of the new-wave artists that inspired them.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oh No
    While there's nothing at all revolutionary in the band's combination of nihilistic lyrics and sunny pop hooks or in their use of dance rhythms behind their guitar power chords, it's nonetheless rare to encounter a major label pop or rock album as start-to-finish good as is Oh No.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ride
    The Ride feels a lot like the debut of a new rising star.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    MDNA
    MDNA is surprisingly cohesive despite its seven-plus producers.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Super Extra Gravity
    Super Extra Gravity... sounds like the product of a young, fresh quintet that's got a whole lot of rock left in 'em.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Three
    Three represents only an incremental progression, not the seismic shift of Voices, but it demonstrates the duo's ability to transform darkness into light, taking personal tragedy and shaping it into professional growth.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Portamento
    The Drums are far too clever a band to suffer a sophomore slump, but Portamento does one better, dispelling any notion that they're merely the flavor of the month.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take My Breath Away
    Take My Breath Away is a heavily populated but still carefully fashioned landscape, never feeling crowded and skipping effortlessly between lush ambience and driving techno.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    9th Ward Pickin' Parlor
    A surprising delight.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Working Girl
    A more sonically focused effort.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Some People Have Real Problems
    Some People is stuffed to the rafters with love songs but they're never precious or cloying, even when the arrangements soar to rousing string/brass/choir-laden climaxes, or when the lyrics are comprised of little more than a string of clichés .
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Colonia
    Colonia is what pop music might have sounded like in the era of gaslights and guillotines.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    True Romance
    Unapologetically indulging her distinctive genre tastes, True Romance largely proves that Estelle's talents were being too encumbered by the demands of record execs and producer John Legend, delivering a fleet 45 minutes of music that sounds more true to her West London upbringing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Emancipation Of Mimi
    But whatever the songs lack, they make up for in restraint--brevity keeps you wanting more, which is really Mimi's virtue.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Business Is Business
    Even if one were to dismiss Business Is Business as nothing more than an anthology of loosies, Thug’s ostensible leftovers, like the brassy “Uncle M” and heart-wrenching ballads like “Jonesboro,” are still electric. In this sense, the album’s greatest strength is keeping things strictly business.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My December
    Though "My December" cuts much of the adult contemporary-style balladry that marred her first two releases (but also displayed more than just her shouting vocal range), the album still finds Clarkson further exploring different facets of her voice.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sound of a Woman
    Sound of a Woman quickly reveals itself to be a crafty bait and switch. With its scratchy trip-hop beat, soulful vocals, and sparsely placed keyboards and synthesized string stabs, "Losin' My Mind" is more Blue Lines than Big Fun, while the Jessie Ware-esque electro-soul ballads "So Deep" and "Vietnam" find the singer dabbling in drum n' bass and freestyle, respectively.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Golden
    While country signifiers abound, from foot-stomping to fiddling, the songs on Golden also smartly juxtapose contemporary pop elements like soaring synth hooks and pitched-up vocals.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mistake, Mistake, Mistake, Mistake
    The rare techno album that's worth digging into.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Widow's Weeds
    Widow’s Weeds may lack the arena-sized atmospherics and anthemic party songs of past Silversun Pickups efforts, but with each additional listen the hooks sink in deeper and the melodies stay longer in your head. It’s catchy, heartfelt, and far less forgettable than…what were those previous two albums named again?
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lonely Avenue
    Lonely Avenue definitively exfoliates its ersatz-'70s, one-off joint-effort stance; more than anything, it's proof that pop can push back against middle-class maturity woes with both rhetorical and diatonic thickness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rewolf
    Chikudate can reign uninterrupted, taking center stage to the sounds of humbled guitars, trickling bells, and the charm of her own lyrical whimsy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beat The Devil's Tattoo
    At its finest, the album serves as the ideal soundtrack for a fleet of lonely, grizzled bikers lost on a desert highway: slow-rolling and hardened, simultaneously seething, brooding, and wistful, and armed with the pride of vagrancy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wildflower
    Crow typically does "melancholy" with panache, so more's the pity that Wildflower often sounds outright dull.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fly Yellow Moon
    Perhaps deemed too conventional for release with Guillemots, Fly Yellow Moon benefits greatly from its uncomplicated scope and stripped-down recording style.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eat Me, Drink Me
    Eat Me, Drink Me is a bona fide creative rebirth.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Out Of Control
    While Out of Control is by no means Girls Aloud's best album (their third effort, "Chemistry," is probably still their crowning glory), it is nonetheless not only one of the best pop albums of 2008.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Under The Iron Sea
    What they have done, to their credit, is take the best elements from those bands--Radiohead's soaring melodies, U2's scope and volume, Coldplay's dogged earnestness--and combine them into something that, for much of Under The Iron Sea's running time, is a perfectly respectable alternative to, say, the likes of Train or The Goo Goo Dolls or to Coldplay's comparatively bland X&Y.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cee Lo's Magic Moment
    The dark songster offers a bright disc full of pudding-rich arrangements and a number of worthy soul hits--just with a little more twinkly tambourine.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Night
    These songs aren't as transcendent as a Chemical Brothers comedown, but they'll suffice until the Chems reunite with Beth Orton.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time To Die
    The hurtling pace the Dodos maintain and the complexity they manage to fill into these tight spaces is fascinating, at times amazing, fitfully matching complexity with speed.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    IV Play
    IV Play may not always hit that high bar, but the artist's persistence and perfectionism are clear, and the results bear as pure of a pedigree as ever.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1612 Underture
    1612 Underture is most effective when the curious synth tones play over quips about poky limestone villages and "suppers for the worms and the owls."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stronger
    With the exception of the obvious electronic manipulation used on "Mr. Know It All," Clarkson's performances on Stronger are more consistently lived-in and evocative than on any of her previous efforts.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crazy Clown Time
    When the album works, it's truly something to behold, a marvelously twisted effort that acts as a corollary to the warped images Lynch has been creating for years.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Born to Die
    One of the more cohesive pop albums in recent memory.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Christmas In The Heart
    Profoundly weird but still cozy, Christmas in the Heart paints an appealing holiday picture: chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost scratching at your ears.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stupid Love
    Smith's latest, Stupid Love, goes a long way toward correcting those earlier mistakes, and it easily stands as her most accomplished, most substantial record.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ...And Star Power
    The album's third side, titled "Scream: Journey Through Hell," isn't quite that, but it's a mostly abrasive collage of disjointed hard-rock riffs that provide only very intermittent pleasures. In one sense, that stretch of music is a detriment to an otherwise astonishing piece of work; in another, like so many double albums of the past, it's all part of the ride.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mumps, Etc.
    Mumps, Etc. is an assured, thematically united set.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Abnormally Attracted To Sin
    But even with its bloated running time, Sin is more thematically satisfying and sonically adventurous than anything Amos has recorded in years.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is What the Truth Feels Like
    It’s easy to chastise aging pop stars for chasing trends or trying to recapture past glories, but those efforts here are thrown into sharp relief by the maturity of the album’s first half.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Too Much Information
    In the past, the absence of an edifyingly crowd-pleasing anthem like that from a Maximo Park album might have signaled a less-than-essential entry in the band's discography; in its place, however, resides a tonal consistency and musical flow not found since A Certain Trigger.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Haiku from Zero
    Pervasive throughout is the sense that yearning for the unobtainable is its own reward, and the band successfully imbues Haiku from Zero with the notion that both pleasure and pain remind us that we’re alive.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    2093
    Repetition is a big one, and not just in the sense of saying the same word over and over again—which Yeat does on “Psychocainë,” whose chorus has him shuffling through several permutations of the phrase “I forgot”—but in songs that, though they’re certainly cutting edge when compared to what else is out there, begin to blur together over time. But while that prevents 2093 from sounding quite as forward-minded as its title suggests, Yeat is finally tapping into a style he can confidently call his own.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In the Lonely Hour
    Just when you've started to grow weary of Smith's pity party, it's over. And there are enough moments of genuine musical, lyrical, and vocal virtuosity and soul to crack even the most hardened listener's icy heart.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Slimeto
    Rather than follow a traceable narrative or thematic through line, the album merely conjures a series of—albeit passionately relayed—images of love, lust, and violence. Fortunately, these snapshots cohere just enough, driven by unceasing and often exhilarating geysers of emotion.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Oh Land
    Oh Land's cinematic arrangements bring Janelle Monáe's ambitious approach to pop music to mind, but tracks like "Wolf & I" and "Lean" draw a bit too heavily from the trip-hop playbook (it doesn't help that Fabricius sounds a lot like Björk) and, however well-excecuted they may be, end up sounding derivative.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sing Into My Mouth
    More than simply a joint stopgap for these indie heavyweights, Sing Into My Mouth serves, like the DJ-Kicks and LateNightTales series, as a musical bibliography for curious fans, and a superbly entertaining one at that.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amputechture
    Amputechture shows a band honing their eruptive sound and bringing it into tight focus for the first time, routinely pushing their music to the wall without ever risking a breach.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros
    The album's adventurous musical scope serves to further expand the mythos behind Ebert's ego-fueled, drug-addled, socio-religious musical experiment.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    DJ-Kicks
    Despite its strict adherence to traditional and relatively straightforward dance aesthetics, the album is often showy, flaunting both its nods to authenticity and an impressive showcase of the genre's low-tech production style.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mirror Eye
    The band takes this gradual structure and spreads it over songs wreathed in recurring patterns, echo effects, and unintelligible chanting voices, resulting in music that's densely circular but moves, slowly and elegantly, with all the beauty of a wisp of smoke.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In The Maybe World
    In The Maybe World is an accessible, if lyrically opaque, work that should please fans of avant-pop that doesn't sound remotely like any of the other cerebral chanteuses out there.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bangerz
    Bangerz is a personal, idiosyncratic effort that finds equal rewards in twentysomething indulgence and inspiring "be yourself" mantras.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Push and Shove
    By and large, the more interesting tracks are stacked on the front end of Push and Shove, and the songs on the second half of the album are comparably safer, blurring together upon first listen.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ARTPOP
    It's Artpop's most naked, straightforward pop moments that are the album's most redemptive.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Timez Are Weird These Days
    Timez Are Hard These Days is low-culture pulp with an unrealistic sense of its own sophistication.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Galore
    Galore makes for one of the most self-assured, strutting debuts in recent memory.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Thecontrollersphere
    thecontrollersphere may be an album of toss-offs, but they're proud ones, earning that status by virtue of robust exploration rather than any real deficiency.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sheezus
    Even when the songwriting is less than revolutionary, the performance holds your attention.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Worried Well
    31Knots deserves encomium for their daring and ingenuity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Secondhand Rapture
    MS MR's knack for durable hooks, in fact, is what keeps the album's gloomy goth-pop anchored.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Limits of Desire
    Small Black successfully avoids a sophomore slump by harnessing their various sonic inclinations.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Uncanney Valley
    It's an album that, smartly, neither embraces the past as empty nostalgia nor ignores the events of the past 12 years.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Dreams & High Hopes
    While it's easy to wish that Ingram took the concept of artistry more seriously, this album makes it clear that he's comfortable with the compromises he's made. He may be capable of more, but Hopes certainly isn't bad for what it is.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blurred Lines
    If slower numbers like the Princely "4 the Rest of My Life" and the Billy Joel-reminiscent piano ballad "The Good Life" are forgettable by comparison, it's because they prosaically articulate the joie de vivre that's already been made abundantly clear in the uptempos. On an album that gets off to such an effervescent start, such blunt pronouncements only serve to kill the vibe.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trágame Tierra
    Left to his own devices, Bates's skittering effects and big, cavernous soundscapes can leave a metallic aftertaste like a mouthful of antibiotics, but the album's female guests--including Norwegian singer-songwriter Susanne Sundfør--provide the blood for Trágame Tierra's big, beating heart.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Vision
    The Vision will reward your temporary suspension of good taste with a solid hour of instantly gratifying party jams.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wikked Lil' Grrrls
    Establishes her as the progenitor of what could be called electro-ethno-pop.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Spirit Indestructible
    Whether her strategy is to sing-song her way beyond the abrasive edges or to conversely turn her voice into an even more abrasive element, Furtado makes it all work.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Almost Everything I Wish I'd Said The Last Time I Saw You...
    When he calls on his rotating cast of collaborators and follows his creative impulses, Grubb makes Wakey!Wakey! a far more rewarding project than one might expect from someone associated with a show that once cast Kevin Federline in a multi-episode arc.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sweet Sister [EP]
    If such a broad spectrum of influences suggests a wicked case of ADHD, it also keeps Sweet Sister compelling for its entire duration, which isn't the backhanded compliment it might seem to be.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bleed Like Me
    If Version 2.0 was techno-pop perfection posing as rock, Bleed Like Me is its noisy, long-haired cousin playing metal riffs in the garage.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Weight of Your Love
    Although The Weight of Your Love doesn't succeed to the same extent as other, older European rock albums drenched in American influences, it makes for a nicely retooled, if occasionally misguided, formula.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Donda
    With Donda, he’s crafted his most unforgiving self-portrait yet, one that, like the best works that plumb a person’s inner depths, winds up reflecting our collective imperfections.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The DeAndre Way
    Soulja Boy's songs remain bizarre models of economy and naivete, wielding repetitive hooks that pivot on mesmerizingly circular beats.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Keys To The World
    For the most part, Keys To The World is a definite step forward and demonstrates that Ashcroft is finally hitting his stride as a solo artist.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    City Beach
    Cunniff has never sounded more joyful as a singer or writer as she does here.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    (One)
    (One) is a good rock album that likely could have been great if not for lack of a solid lead single and anything resembling overall coherence in its thematic overtones.
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