Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,122 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: 1,692 out of 3122
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3122
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3122
3122 music reviews
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    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Out Among the Stars
    Out Among the Stars is a reminder of how easy Cash made it all look even when he was slumping.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Roll with the Punches
    It's the first Van Morrison album in over a decade that doesn't just rest on his legacy, but actually expands it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hard Bargain
    Though her voice has begun to show some signs of wear, Harris remains one of popular music's most compelling, evocative vocal stylists, and that makes Hard Bargain an easy sell.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carry Me Back
    What's most impressive about the songs on Carry Me Back is that, in composing their original material, OCMS manages to apply their old-timey frame of reference to contemporary issues with subtlety and control.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Light the Horizon
    This is a solid album with a truly woeful centerpiece.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Notes on a Conditional Form
    It might not live up to its lofty goals, but the sheer amount of daring on Notes on a Conditional Form solidifies the four guitar-wielding dudes of the 1975 as the biggest, boldest, and brashest purveyors of something resembling what we used to call rock n’ roll, which, as Healy knows well, was always at least as much a pose as a sound. He wears it well.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nick Jonas
    With a mix of urban-leaning tracks and more radio-ready Top 40 fare, the album shrewdly distances Jonas from his former band's straightforward pop-rock.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood
    Barnes's willingness to use it as a mechanism for bearing his deepest fears and vulnerabilities--even through the highly stylized filter of a paranoid retro-futurist nightmare--makes White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood deceptively relatable.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Man on the Moon, Vol. 2: The Legend of Mr. Rager
    Pursuing genius at the expense of consistency might work out just fine for Cudi: I'm not convinced that he's a good rapper, but I'm pretty sure he's an important one.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Painting With
    This is, after all, Animal Collective's attempt at stuffing a decade's worth of changing tastes into 12 disciplined, bite-sized songs. What's most impressive is that they accomplish this feat without ever letting accessibility compromise their individual preferences as artists, and vice versa.
    • 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
    • 30 Critic Score
    Bitter Tea
    Less a rebound from the indulgent for-friends-and-family-only nightmare of Rehearsing My Choir than a lateral side-step, Bitter Tea sounds like a desperate plea to be labeled as "clever."
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Is This Heart?
    A collision between complex, elegant songwriting and soppy bedroom angst, it's not the most coherent collection of songs, but that disorder works, ending up as a function of Krell's ultimately fascinating sense of experimentation.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Here Comes the Cowboy
    Like 2017’s This Old Dog and 2015’s Another One, the album doesn’t represent a progression so much as a broadening of what DeMarco has already proven himself to be capable of as a songwriter.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electrified
    While there's a definite sense of in-studio spontaneity to Electrified, the album's only significant flaw is that the songs sound restrained in their current form.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Absolute Garbage
    'Tell Me Where It Hurts' is an undeniable sign that, despite their extended hiatuses and internal turmoil, Garbage is very much alive with ideas and ambition.
    • 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
    • 10 Critic Score
    True
    No one demonstrates the artist-as-cash-machine ethos better, as the mechanical churn of commerce rings loudly on each and every track.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Funhouse
    If the album doesn't always make that point in its words, it consistently makes that point by being as fun a pop record as Pink's albums tend to be.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Woman
    Ultimately, Woman‘s choral and orchestral contributions make the album stand out not only from Justice’s own prior work, but also from the throng of more repetitive electronic music that’s prevalent today.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Throwback to the Future
    BROOKZILL's cultural synthesis wouldn't be possible without the skillfully realized instrumentation: 808-style breakbeats are masterfully mixed with samba percussion on “Raise the Flag,” “Mysterious,” and “S. Bento MC5,” creating unexpected rhythms, but ones which still make sense within a traditional hip-hop framework.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Oczy Mlody
    What makes Oczy Mlody so enthralling is that the Flaming Lips are ambitious in their exploration of the aftermath of their typical spectacle.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Forcefield
    Tokyo Police Club operates as a kind of derelict garage band, and their offbeat lyrical imagery and crunchy guitar-drum combinations work to enhance the album's messy, unpretentious charm.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Solar Power
    On the whole, the 12 songs here are quieter, more meditative, and more grown-up than Lorde’s past efforts. But while Solar Power doesn’t traffic in the booming emotional catharsis of Melodrama, it doesn’t succumb to navel-gazing solipsism either.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Classics
    Laid back as it is, what Classics lacks is the force of purpose to overcome its target audience of hipster kids' aversion to--or limited ability for--dancing.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall
    By turns baroque, jazzy, morose, and enraptured, they're a perfect opportunity for Wainwright to showcase his capacity as a singer in terms of tone and melodic emphasis. And showcase he does, deploying his dulcet foghorn of a voice with subtlety, grace, and elasticity
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kleerup
    This one is as strong and consistent as it is makes it all the more special.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Doll Posse
    If still too uneven and entirely too overstuffed to rank among her most essential albums, American Doll Posse is certainly Amos's most ambitious record, both for the breadth of its sound and for the scope of its driving concept.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To The Races
    Finally Bachmann's songs sound familiar and not derivative.
    • 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
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Quilt
    Even a guest verse from Busta Rhymes can't breathe any life into this copy-and-paste mess.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mirage Rock
    While Mirage Rock may want for a certain degree of ambition and creativity, Band of Horses have, at the very least, figured out how to bring Americana music to a mainstream rock audience without succumbing to the genre's most dire, comatose conventions.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Between Two Shores
    An album that wrestles with heartbreak but always balances it with warmth and sincerity.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    We Are Born
    While We Are Born may not be as immediate or distinctive a statement as its predecessor, there's ultimately very little about it that doesn't work.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    ...Featuring Norah Jones
    ...Featuring Norah Jones may attempt to cast her in something of a supporting role, but it's still definitively a Norah Jones record, and a solid one at that.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young & Old
    The problem is, even at their best, Tennis's music seems inconsequential and frankly, neutered.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Does You Inspire You
    'Bruises,' the latest in a long line of bouncy pop ditties to ingratiate themselves into our collective pop consciousness via an iPod commercial, proves that the band is capable of being poignant without taking themselves too seriously, but much of Does You Inspire You, like the ode to pencils 'Evident Utensil,' veers a little too far into silly territory to elevate the album above a well-made and well-performed oddity.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Sun & The Neon Light
    Fans can rest easy: Sun and the Neon Light is not perfect, but it's also no late-model Chemical Brothers album.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Business Casual
    Here they're presented lovingly whole and intact, without irony, as keystones to be cherished and admired.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    My World Is Gone
    My World Is Gone is an enveloping, at times even uplifting album, its charms diminished only by moments of jumble and overreach.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Entanglements
    Conceptually, Entanglements has been done before, but lyrics are reprised and musical sentences are repeated in such a way that it creates a singularly cohesive, linear narrative piece.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Abbey Road Sessions
    Minogue's early material fares well, if only because any incarnations would be an improvement over the cheesy Stock, Aitken, and Waterman originals, but it's the songs that receive the most drastic revisions that elevate the album above a mere exercise or cash grab.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Free the Universe
    Free the Universe is, after all, a party album, and by using an energetic mix of faces both famous and obscure, Diplo keeps his grungy dancehall rave running on all cylinders.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Opposites
    Opposites is ultimately a surprisingly immediate and rewarding listen, compensating in consistency for what it lacks in depth.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Weathervanes
    Weathervanes, is thoroughly unoriginal in every way possible, even down to the Gibbard-esque vocals. Now, that sounds pretty damning, but fortunately their failures in ingenuity are easily made up in spectacle.
    • 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
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lenses
    Combining a driving beat with melancholy vocals may not exactly be anything new in pop music, but the juxtaposition of the two here elicits an entrancing state more conducive to impassioned swaying than outright dancing.
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