Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,119 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: 1,689 out of 3119
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3119
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3119
3119 music reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    All of You
    For the most part, All of You is virtually indistinguishable from Caillat's previous work, though the appearance of Common on "Favorite Song" does threaten to disrupt business as usual.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Marshall Mathers LP
    The collaborative efforts of tracks like "Bitch Please II" and "Under the Influence" make Eminem seem like an ornamental prop in Dr. Dre's ever-growing hip-hop dynasty.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ukulele Songs
    The slapdash nature of these 16 (!) songs doesn't make them feel visceral or honest (which was clearly the artist's intention), but haphazard and disposable.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Realism
    Here there are few bright spots and barely any prevailing concept to blame that fact on, leaving Realism as a bad album with nothing but the band behind it to blame.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    No. 6 Collaborations Project
    Too often here, Sheeran feels like a supporting player, especially when he strays from his wheelhouse. For instance, if the singer wants to lean into rapping more, he’s not likely to benefit from doing so on the same track as Chance. And when Sheeran trots out his bad-boy routine, his music feels ersatz. It’s playacting of the worst kind.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stranger Things
    While the juxtaposition of upbeat music and melancholic lyrics has succeeded for artists from the Beatles to David Bowie, here such tactics, amid music that betrays so little originality, render these hackneyed emotional confessions nothing more than indulgent.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Slipway Fires
    The rest of the band, a soulless cooperative between Sweden and the U.K., does their best to back him up, issuing rote, lifeless rock tracks that build appropriately to fist-pumping peaks, but it's Borrell's vocals that press this album past mediocrity into embarrassing territory.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Happy Hollow
    Happy Hollow is far too grouchy to be taken seriously.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Brightest Blue
    For the most part, she doesn’t have the chops or soul of contemporaries like Florence Welch, who sings of similar subject matter with a real torch, and who shares a collaborator in Joseph Kearns, who produced almost every song on Brightest Blue. At Kearns’s behest, the album takes a relatively new tack for Goulding, trading the garish for the palatable, but it’s no less grating as a result.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    I Dreamed A Dream
    Because the songs are so riddled with cliches and are largely too familiar, and because the music is so tepid and tasteful to a fault, the album simply isn't able to overcome that lack of depth.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Album
    While the album’s sheer eclecticism is admirable in theory, each foray stops short of reaching its full potential, leaving listeners stranded in a musical no man’s land of half-baked ideas and missed opportunities.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    - (Subtract)
    No matter how much aesthetic cosplay Sheeran is willing to engage in, though, he’s still pumping out the same cheese-filled anthems that have plagued his previous albums.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Battle Studies
    It's clear that he's capable of far more than this. What's most puzzling and disappointing about Battle Studies, then, is that its banality seems like a deliberate choice.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Tinted Windows
    Listeners are subjected to nothing more than a glorified boy band trying desperately to recapture a second wind.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    This Is Us
    Most of the songs are just complete misfires.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Daniel Powter
    A reminder that "adult" pop can be every bit as vapid and formulaic as its teenage counterparts.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kindred
    Unfortunately, Kindred only loses the plot further, entrenching itself in a sonically limited pop vocabulary (starchy synth lines; bristling, reverb-doused percussion; and huge, multi-tracked choruses) that's even further away from the chaotic chemistry of his debut.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Year Of The Black Rainbow
    There's no trace of Coheed's oddball eclecticism here, or of their dynamic pop sensibilities; instead the emotionally and tonally monochrome Black Rainbow gives the impression of a typically humorless metal act.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Recovery
    Much of Recovery centers around such themes as romantic devotion and anxiety, but the resulting material rings unsurprisingly hollow.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Get Hurt
    Get Hurt is a shockingly misguided assemblage of over-processed hair-metal guitars, '80s adult-contemporary keyboard swill, and hilariously overblown skullduggery.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Look What You Made Me
    Look What You Made Me will burn brightly for a few more weeks on the strength of its club readiness, but with Berg's flaccid delivery, misguided confidence, and no desire to shake up well-worn subject matter, the album should fade into oblivion like so many other disposable pop-rap LPs.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Walls
    Even by the standards of the arena-pop hit-chasers they've become, and not the down-and-dirty guitar band they once were, WALLS is a grating, overly slick disappointment.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Songbird
    An enormous disappointment.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Break the Spell
    That lack of a distinctive style or voice also means that Daughtry isn't pulling focus from the simple and effective construction of their songs, which is pretty much the only thing they do well.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Raymond v. Raymond
    The album is consistently uninspired, with each song showcasing an incredibly gifted performer grown wearyingly complacent.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Versions
    With Versions, Jesus achieves something her previous albums hadn't: She's created art so unobjectionable that it attains a kind of beige obscenity.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Getting Somewhere
    Getting Somewhere is the first of her albums that not even her vocals can save.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Graffiti on the Train
    The whole album seems content to be half-awake, so much so that even the comparably adventurous tracks sound like they can't be bothered to get off the couch.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Endlessly
    Two years ago, Duffy had us begging her for mercy, but after 10 tracks of Endlessly, I was just begging her to stop.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Destroyed
    The motion is uniform, the form is monotonous, the experience disquieting but benign. Destroyed is more distracted than coolly distanced, a satellite unmoored by Ground Control.
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