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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    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Good Luck
    Good Luck fits roughly into similar experiments by Backxwash or JPEGMAFIA, but it’s even harder to pin down to a single genre. It’s an album that testifies to the liberating potential of making a racket.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Girl With Fish
    Girl with Fish, then, is an economical calling card and the sound of a band coming into their own.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hard Candy
    The entire album is a self-declaration of Madonna's stamina, but it also reflects a woman who clearly feels like she's in a furious battle against time. Her legacy is already assured, so scoring another U.S. hit is just icing on the cake but she acts like she doesn't know it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ring
    Ring is more a cohesive, narrative song cycle than a simple collection of disparate pop songs.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ultra Truth
    While the almost hour-long album does suffer the occasional lull, at his best Avery effortlessly pushes the sounds that influenced him into new territory.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Flourish // Perish
    Braids perform with a self-assured subtlety, lending their sophomore album a quiet, unassuming depth that far outstrips the flash of its predecessor.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Virtue
    Casablancas may not have many answers to his big questions other than expressing a desire to escape it all, but the combination of musical dynamism and lyrical desperation makes Virtue a cathartic experience, if not an especially comforting one.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Call Me Crazy
    Crazy is confused and conflicted. Taken in the context of Womack's career as a whole, however, it's fairly representative of how she has vacillated between sterling, smart traditional cuts like 'The Fool' and 'Does My Ring Burn Your Finger' and vapid Faith Hill knockoffs like 'Something Worth Leaving Behind' and 'Why They Call It Falling.'
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Father of the Bride
    At 18 tracks and 58 minutes, Father of the Bride is by far the longest release by a band whose brevity was once one of their best characteristics. This results in a not-insignificant amount of bloat, including at least one or two songs—like the lounge jazz disaster “My Mistake”--that should have been left in the outtakes pile.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not
    Not given over entirely to the atmospherics of Beyond, the heavy jamminess of Farm, or the poppiness of I Bet on Sky, Give a Glimpse instead combines all those stylistic elements into a package that may not feature as many lastingly memorable songs, but is replete with all the welcome signatures of the band's sound.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Foreign Landscapes
    Treatments like this ferret out the striking undertones of quotidian places, making clear the shape of their influence on Bertelmann, while still leaving room for some measure of the listener's own.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lotta Sea Lice
    What the album lacks in ambition or surprise, it makes up for as a showcase of the two artists' chummy chemistry and lovably droll personalities.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pearl Jam
    It's got all the elements of a great album, but it doesn't evoke the feeling of listening to the band's first three seminal albums.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Worried Well
    31Knots deserves encomium for their daring and ingenuity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Amok
    Yorke and Godrich have quite ironically produced a fairly solid, if not stellar, Radiohead album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Folila
    While the album does act as an introduction to the group for beginners and a primer on the complicated rhythms of African pop, it does so mostly by engraining familiar artists and concepts within their style, a process which foments an expansion of their sound rather than watering it down.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Host
    Producer Shane Stoneback resumes his role as the unofficial third member of the group, ensuring that Host, in spite of its dabbling in live instrumentation, springs from the same atmospheric vein as previous Cults albums.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here
    At times Here feels like it wants to be What's Going On, the standard-bearer of socially-conscious soul, but it's more akin to Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, mixing the political with the personal.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chance of Rain
    There's a sketchbook quality to the album, a formlessness that it never quite escapes, nor seems to want to. But there are worse things to do, Halo knows, than to get lost in the clouds for a while.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blood Under the Bridge
    Blood Under the Bridge may not garner much critical attention, but it's both a roundly rewarding album and a quietly thrilling throwback.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vertikal
    Mirroring the Fritz Lang film's portrayal of man operating and essentially becoming a part of a machine, the Swedish band plays their instruments meticulously and repetitively.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Letter to You
    Springsteen deserves credit for resisting the crowd-pleasing tug of this kind of album for so long that it feels like a warm homecoming rather than a retread. It’s only when Springsteen leans on the nostalgia with explicitly backward-facing lyrics that the album gets a bit too self-aware. ... The E Street Band proves that when they’re in their element—as they are on this album—they can elevate the Boss to his best.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hello Young Lovers
    What makes Hello Young Lovers a more interesting album than many pop purists might give it credit for is how Sparks' anti-pop approach to song structure and instrumentation give their compositions both a weight and a replay value that they wouldn't otherwise have.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Loose
    Furtado's style-hopping nature makes her a never less-than-interesting artist, but it doesn't work to her advantage when it occurs within the same record, and that's what ultimately keeps Loose from cohering as a singularly great pop album the way her prior efforts did.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guts
    Despite occasional missteps like that and “Pretty Isn’t Pretty,” which feels like a risk-averse treatise on an important issue, Guts is more consistent than Rodrigo’s debut. Her writing has gotten more precise, which makes both her self-criticism and frequent barbs hurled at others land all the better. She’s also writing with a knottier, less easily resolved perspective this time around.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Business Casual
    Here they're presented lovingly whole and intact, without irony, as keystones to be cherished and admired.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mala
    Mala attests to a discipline that was absent in Banhart's recent, loopier ventures, proving that his eccentric songwriting works best when harnessed in service of good storytelling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harps And Angels
    If Harps and Angels occasionally seems uneven, it's because Newman is still so daring. If it seems occasionally classic, it's because he's still so insightful and startlingly good at writing songs.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino
    Though Turner may be sardonic to a fault, making it difficult to determine where the snark ends and genuine sentiment begins, the album is audacious in its conceptual conceit, challenging expectations established through the boozy nightlife anthems of the band's earlier work with an experimental approach that's contemplative and unrepentantly abstruse.
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