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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Food for Worms
    Aside from one or two cuts, though, nothing here is as satisfying as previous Shame highlights like the nervy, ominous “Snow Day” or “Nigel Hitter,” whose splintered dance-rock managed to be both hooky and weird. For the most part, Food for Worms manages to be neither.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Block
    The Block falters when the New Kids try to have it both ways.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Way
    For all its lofty goals and risky production decisions, the album runs out of steam with such sudden regression that it becomes impossible to advocate Brown's "way."
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mommy
    The scuzzy guitars, driving rhythms, and yelled vocals are all here, but Mommy fails to recapture the lightning in a bottle that made their initial run so magnetic.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Leaving Eden
    The result is an album full of gateway music, lovingly made knockoffs that point to the purer and smarter bluegrass it's imitating.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pray IV Reign
    His work is still glaringly standard, all puffed-up machismo and stock sexual banter.
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lasers
    Lupe's half-assed, club-ready radicalism is ultimately the most frustrating thing about Lasers, and not just because it provides numerous and obvious examples of rap's self-styled emancipator consorting with his avowed enemies.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heretofore
    Heretofore highlights the technical skill and genre-blurring vision that makes Megafaun one of the most captivating acts in Americana. But when their ideas run too far out of bounds, the album also makes it clear that Megafaun hasn't quite figured themselves out yet.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Angels Of Destruction
    Overproduction, unfortunately, doesn't fully account for its flaws. Too many of the songs invoke heavy-handed spiritual imagery.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Odd Couple
    Needless to say, though, Odd Couple doesn't conjure the same immediate wow-factor as "St. Elsewhere."
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hymn and Her
    Unfortunately, there is nothing here that they haven't done before with more attractive results.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    No Mercy
    Mostly, the album shows that T.I.'s lyrical side is not worthy of much attention.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chromatica
    Whether muddling the creation of the universe with both love and fame (“Sine from Above”) or teasing the theory of the world as a simulation (“Enigma”), these songs only scratch the surface of deeper ideas before falling back on the most basic of pop clichés.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Folie A Deux
    The album's best moments are those that hum along unassumingly, giving the songs room to be catchy and simple and the hooks room to sneak up on you. These moments, however, are rare and fleeting.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In A Perfect World...
    Perfect World is merely passable, and Hilson needs to do much more than pick fights with Beyoncé to justify her transition from hook girl to solo star.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Narrow Stairs
    Death Cab mostly abandons the full-sounding multi-tracked production they preferred during their rise to primetime soap stardom, and the effect is unflattering.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gossamer
    Gossamer is true to its name: colorless and precariously thin, with precious few bright spots.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It's Frightening
    More often than not, It's Frightening is caught on middling ground, at once striving to be unpretentious while still hoping to challenge listeners' expectations. The album accomplishes neither, however, as the band's aversion to let sound fall where it may produces little beyond impressions of gloppy heavy-handedness and obtuse haze.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Secret Migration
    Where once we got shivers up our spines from this band's music, now we're just left cold.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dancing Queen
    Faithful to a fault, the tracklist sticks safely to ABBA’s most well-known hits, among them “SOS,” “Mamma Mia,” and, of course, the title track. There are scant re-imaginings here, and no obscure disco gems.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    20 Y.O.
    The saddest thing about 20 Y.O. is that Janet's decision to hedge her bets on an album whose backbone is made up of terrible R&B instead of great dance music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Manafon
    Its spaces of hollow inaction are far too big, and the concessions it expects of its audience far too large for so little payoff.
    • 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dignity
    Dignity is bland by any standard.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    You're Nothing
    You're Nothing provides another solid 12 tracks of loud, bleak teenage ennui, but with a comparative lack of genre diversity.
    • 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
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magic Hour
    A muddled, uneven album that, for a few interminable stretches, sounds like it could've been recorded by just about anyone.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
    That the album is so wildly uneven perhaps speaks to the underlying quandaries its concept presents.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    King of the Beach
    A performer like Williams has a lot to lose by releasing what is, by and large, an accessible pop-rock album.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    8 Diagrams
    The formula ain't broken and it occasionally still cracks with some of that old pharmaceutical majesty.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Perfect Symmetry
    Unfortunately, Perfect Symmetry is an album characterized by its heavy-handedness, so while it sounds as though the band was aiming for Echo & the Bunnymen, they hit Duran Duran or Simple Minds instead, making for a brand new record that often sounds badly dated.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Centipede Hz
    Centipede Hz may have a lot of interesting elements floating around, and it may be held together by the same strong songcraft that has always sustained Animal Collective, but it's all too murky and familiar, less profoundly complex than inaccessibly complicated.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Disc-Overy
    The consistent issue with Disc-Overy is the pairing of Tempah with people who fail to elevate him.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Suckerpunch
    Too often, the album’s songwriting seems to be in service of odd aural components that overburden its 13 succinct tracks.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Havoc and Bright Lights
    Unfortunately, too many of the songs on Havoc lack that specificity and Morissette's inimitable POV. Her best material has always traded in forces of tension and change, but she spends most of the album sounding like she's leading a meditation.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Fame
    Gaga's lyrics alternate between cheap drivel and nonsensical drivel, and her vocal performances are uneven at best....The songs that work--and there are plenty, including 'Poker Face,' 'Starstruck,' 'Paper Gangsta' and 'Summerboy'--rest almost solely on their snappy production and sing-along hooks and reveal Gaga as the Xtina/Gwen/Fergie hydra monster that she is.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Breakout
    For teen-pop (despite what Annie Leibovitz would have us believe, Miley is only 15, after all), your kid could do worse.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cracker Island
    Much like 2017’s overstuffed Humanz, Cracker Island is, more times than not, overly indebted to its impressive list of guest stars, foregrounding their talents instead of employing them as natural extensions of Albarn’s musicianship.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Only By The Night
    While their ambition for evolving remains admirable, their apparent failure to understand their own strengths is troubling and undermines the promise they showed on their previous efforts.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jellies
    77:78 sees Fletcher and Parkin opting to merely dip their toes into such heterogeneity, yielding music with a far narrower scope and failing to break fresh ground.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Congratulations
    In striving rather openly to set their sophomore effort apart from what they view as the critically acclaimed trappings of their debut, MGMT offers what is, essentially, an album of B-sides--a few bright spots strung together with half-baked concepts and monotony, in need of a lot less knob-tweaking and a whole lot more rewrites.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Secret Life Of The Veronicas
    The Secret Life Of The Veronicas won't ever be considered anything more than what it is: utterly disposable, shamefully enjoyable, and transparently unoriginal music that, in a just world, will spend its brief moment in the sun entertaining the 11 year olds who wouldn't dare miss an episode of That's So Raven.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sings Elvis
    At this point in his own career, Danzig may still be able to approximate Elvis’s vocal range, but he fails to invest these songs with a unique vision.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    DRILLMATIC Heart vs. Mind
    Unlike his arch rival, 50 Cent, the Game has always been an impressive rapper but a substandard songwriter. The trend continues on Drillmatic, with equally frictionless results.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Element Of Freedom
    With so few highlights, an unwieldy 52-minute runtime, and a second half nearly devoid of strong material, Freedom doesn't begin to contend with that release--or indeed, even many of those by Keys's objectively less talented contemporaries.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Love You, It's Cool
    With its bright spots marred by detachment, despondency, and meandering, I Love You, It's Cool fails to deliver on the promise of Beast Rest Forth Mouth, knocking Bear in Heaven back a tier or two in the race for indie electro-pop supremacy.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bittersweet World
    Bittersweet World is another step in the right direction for Simpson; now if only she'd learn that real rule breakers don't write songs about it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A New Tide
    New Tide continues Gomez's struggle to accurately identify its sound after the initial boon of 1998's Mercury Prize, further wedging them into a narrow void between two unbecoming styles.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Temple of I & I
    Too sleek to be real, The Temple of I and I sounds less like Jamaica than the music on the Virgin flight you might hear on the way there.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Is What I Mean
    Far too often, Stormzy sounds crushed under the weight of his own unrelenting seriousness.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Volume Two
    In his solo work, Ward's songs have exhibited a kind of arcane gritty lyricism: They're false museum pieces, revivifying old notions of garage-sale Americana, but they have heart and feel at least partially lived in. There's very little of that here, and though it's hard to hate Volume Two, it's also far too easy to forget it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mojo
    The record is long on instrumentals and short on singing, with Petty showing up mostly to fill space between guitar solos and extended jams, giving Mojo a higher Heartbreakers-to-Petty ratio than any previous release. But if Mojo is meant to be the band's showcase, it's not an especially successful one.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Costello Music
    The songs are incredibly catchy but also tediously misogynistic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fear Is On Our Side
    Fear Is On Our Side is slickly produced... and resplendent in its studied somber nature, which makes mining the by-now exhausted vein of viscerally dark '80s rock an all the more unfortunate choice.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Christopher
    The song [vapory closing number "Heart Attack"] almost saves Christopher from venturing into annoying self-parody, but it's ultimately unsuccessful due to the uncertainty of its message.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    If Not Now, When?
    If Not Now, When? is frustrating in many ways, chiefly because it feels like a step in the wrong direction for a band that can still pen enthralling tunes.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Earth vs. the Pipettes
    "From Today" and "I Need a Little Time" may have decent enough hooks and propulsive dance beats, but there's simply nothing about Earth vs. the Pipettes that's distinctive or in any way better than what other '80s revivalists have already done.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night
    In the end, the album's real failing is not its individual flaws but a dry, rote feeling that descends halfway through the album, where you realize you're listening to little more than a reheated punk snarl that has been cleaned up and shipped back to the U.S. from overseas more than 30 years after the fact.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Told You I Was Freaky
    The material is better served in context, complete with music videos and framed with dialogue, whereas as a standalone record it misses more than it hits.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tripper
    There's a certain threshold for this kind of demanding material before it gets tiring. It's one that Tripper, staunchly dominated by an old-school style of wanky craftsmanship, crosses pretty quickly.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Swoon
    The Silversun Pickups show here that they've got a competent grasp of the amp-frying guitar soundscape, but someone needs to teach them how to write a decent rock song.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Broken Bells
    At its very best, when the collaboration clicks, Broken Bells boasts some truly marvelous songs, but these peaks are sandwiched between tracks that struggle to exceed colorless tedium.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    No Boys Allowed
    Keri is so very...what? It sounds like she's making a move at Chaka-Whitney "every woman" territory, only with a few key differences.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Night the Sun Came Up
    The Night the Sun Came Up fails to back up her claim that she's more than just a Ke$ha clone.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Welcome Home
    If the album's greatest sin was simply sonic banality, it would be a lot more palatable. Far worse is the cynical nature of the album's roosty overtures.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am Me
    I Am Me isn't half bad--but it's only half good.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Weirdness
    The Weirdness never sounds like anything more than a competent but ultimately unremarkable band that sounds a little like The Stooges.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sol Invictus
    Absent the lightning-in-a-bottle voltage of their heyday, Faith No More's Sol Invictus is shockingly no more than adequate.
    • 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anywhere I Lay My Head
    The album itself is kind of an afterthought; what its creation says metatextually about the artists responsible for it is more interesting than any of the music it contains.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Best Night of My Life
    He drops his share of deafening clunkers, poisoning some songs so badly that they become unlistenable. But others, mostly those where he stands back and croons harmlessly in the background, are deliciously chill.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trans-Continental Hustle
    Founded on precepts of energy, positivity, and speed, the band has no choice but to keep pushing these buttons, churning out records whose rampant energy belies an increasing sense of atrophying decay.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    (III)
    III is an album of earnest, expansive electronica from a duo few are expecting such sincerity from, and it edges them directly into the middle of the road.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Eraser
    If anything, The Eraser more than proves that Yorke, no matter how intriguing or forward-thinking his ideas, needs the democracy of Radiohead to ground his more angular artistic impulses.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Biasonic Hotsauce: Birth of the Nanocloud
    Biasonic Hotsauce peaks far too early.
    • 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Revival
    Eminem can still dazzle with his wordplay--“Adversity, if at first you don't succeed/Put your temper to more use/'Cause being broke's a poor excuse” is an early highlight on “Believe”--yet his delivery, listless torrents of language, makes him seem noncommittal to the songs he's performing. He's not quite on autopilot throughout, but he does sound distracted. Eminem is more engaged on Revival when his focus turns to his family.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love This Giant
    A May-November partnership that results in a spate of interesting moments, but largely dies on the vine.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jinx
    Jinx starts out promising, with a few well-crafted and consistently surprising gems, but the lackluster backend seems far too content to tread water.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jekyll + Hyde
    On one hand, some of experiments fall well outside Brown's songwriting wheelhouse, like the hideous seven-minute butt rock "Junkyard," or the vaguely offensive Caribbean-lite "Castaway." On the other hand, the album is a showcase for what's clearly a versatile group of musicians, and its strongest five-song stretch turns on a dime from pseudo-gospel with bagpipes ("Remedy") to pop-country ("Homegrown") to big band ("Mango Tree") to heavy K-Rock fodder featuring Chris Cornell ("Heavy Is the Head") to lilting country-folk ("Bittersweet").
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