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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    La Sera
    If the album format is really dying, then Goodman's got a good shot at cornering the market of 21st-century Shangri-La candy pop, but she should do it two minutes at a time.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    V
    V is almost cinematic, conjuring up rich, kaleidoscopic vistas as the band transforms from stoned-out beach bums to wide-eyed globetrotters.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Aug 13, 2014
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Traveler
    The result isn't exactly Phishy, but it's a merry mishmash, a frothy frolic best appreciated as a sort of senior-spring record.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo
    For a collection of lo-fi home demos, Rivers Cuomo's Alone, in its better moments, sure does sound at times like a return to form.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wreckorder
    Clocking in at a brisk 34 minutes, there isn't enough time for Wreckorder to falter. But on the other hand, Healy can't seem to find the time to amply spread his wings either.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Cost
    Epic in both sound and content, The Cost is both The Frames' most accomplished album and deeper and more rewarding than U2's recent work.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
    It's the rare, grin-inducing Wilson indulgence that doesn't involve some drug-inspired nonsense about enchanted transistor radios. The entirety of Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin reeks of a newfound arrogance that lifts this Beach Boys aficionado's spirits.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Loyalty To Loyalty
    Cold War Kids have exploded rather than refined their style here, which too often turns what were formerly strengths into liabilities and turns what were formerly liabilities into, well, even greater liabilities.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    While(1<2)
    Repeating very simple, barely there melodies over spare arrangements and ghostly keys is fine when you're soundtracking a Michael Mann film, but it isn't enough to fill the long gaps between your club-crashers.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hanna
    None of the tracks on Hanna do more than they have to, but at least they do that much.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Tourniquet
    Unfortunately, tracks like "The Pacemaker" amount to a lot of electronic pitter-patter and not a whole lot of substance, revealing a collection of songs that's less ambitious and tightly woven than 2004's exquisite On Your Side.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lioness: Hidden Treasures
    "Lioness" adds nothing of substance to the Winehouse narrative, nor do its individual tracks showcase the best of her writing or singing.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Talk a Good Game
    Talk a Good Game's standout tracks prove that she's closer to carving a niche for herself than she has been on prior efforts that suppressed rather than addressed that difficulty.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Gifted
    With The Gifted, his second album for Maybach Music Group, Wale continues to struggle to define himself, which proves even more difficult on a label dominated by broad caricatures.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Delta Machine
    Another reasonably strong effort for a band that's managed to get wise without growing too old.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You & I
    Fortunately, while You & I loses some of the distinctive details of its predecessor, the duo pulls off "conventional" just as well as they do twisted.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unplugged
    An abbreviated "You Don't Know My Name," truly a producer's creation, falls flat here, and she treats covers of Gladys Knight's "If I Was Your Woman" and "Every Little Bit Hurts" like vocal auditions and not the blank canvases of an interpretive artist.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ashes and Roses
    She's been treading water artistically for years now, recording and re-recording slight variations on the same polite, coffeehouse-folk album, and Ashes and Roses is just as lifeless as its predecessor.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Return of Mr. Zone 6
    The Return of Mr. Zone 6 proves to be not just a return to making music, but to the same damning patterns that have left him content with his own mediocrity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nina
    The album's energy grows out of a band taking chances, and while not every reimagining works, there's something satisfying about listening to a group of artists crash head-on into an experiment and find clarity among the fragments.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Wild One
    It isn't as robust--musically or vocally--as their first collaboration.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Twelve
    These songs are rendered so faithfully they may as well be karaoke.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wait For Me
    Wait for Me is persistent in humility and dismissive of grandeur, often preferring sedate exposition to the usual club-conquering anthems. It's not the most daring choice of experimentation, but for an artist as commercially minded as Moby, it remains refreshing nonetheless.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Spiritual Mental Physical
    The band has undeniable horsepower, driven mostly by Dannis's fantastic drumming, and that strength shows itself in a few key moments here, but the collection is unfortunately padded with half an album's worth of inconsequential rehearsal extracts.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sawdust
    Sawdust will still fill in the void for fans--to which the album is dedicated, natch--while they wait for a new LP.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mylo Xyloto
    While the melodies on Mylo Xyloto are some of the strongest and most memorable in the band's catalogue, it's the shortcomings in their lyrics that keep Coldplay from packing the kind of emotional wallop their sound really demands.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Spirit
    Though the 21-year-old's faithful, capable rendition of 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face' proves that the timelessness of the song should remain unquestioned, the album's adult-skewed material sounds even more jarring next to two fresh new tracks, the bouncy and youthful 'Forgive Me' and urban club jam 'Misses Glass,' added for American consumption.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kicks
    Kicks is forgettable fare.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music for Robots [EP]
    On record it mostly reads as another dry intellectual exercise by a man whose career has become cluttered with them.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Appeal To Reason
    Because of the current pop landscape's shift away from melodic rock it's impossible to tell if Rise Against will ever break out, but it's nice to know that, either way, they're still making aggressive, well structured pop-minded hardcore.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The House
    Orbit's production doesn't find as forceful a match as it did with Madonna on Ray of Light, and Melua's style still seems too thin to support true greatness, but The House is a promising start, a sporadically grand album that finds another talented artist rescued from mediocre pop oblivion.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Law Of The Playground
    While the idea of artistic maturity might seem anathema to the very appeal of the Boy Least Likely To, Playground marks the pair's awkward first steps toward adulthood.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Court Yard Hounds
    That the songs are solidly constructed gives Court Yard Hounds ample opportunity to play around with structure and production.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Evolution
    I would say she should leave the bumper-sticker philosophizing to Oprah and Tyra and stick to singing, but she doesn't excel at that either.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Brave And The Bold
    The more adventurous picks on The Brave And The Bold sink more often than they soar.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prisoner of Conscious
    More than any of his previous albums, Prisoner of Conscious is the sound of Kweli performing art for art's sake, hip-hop for the sake of hip-hop, with hardly a homily to be found.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sex Change
    Sex Change, like some of the best pieces by the Boredoms or Glenn Branca or Eno, is a startlingly fun album to listen to.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Take the Crown
    Take the Crown lapses into the same grandiose self-help talk and too-slick production that's marred his recent albums.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jeff Bridges
    The ghostly "Slow Boat," which Bridges co-wrote with Burnett and Thomas Cobb, shares its title with a song referenced in Cobb's Crazy Heart, but which was unused in the film adaptation. These underplayed self-referential moments add character to the album and allow Bridges to make it a more definitive personal statement.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Storm & Grace
    Storm & Grace is an effortless, natural-sounding collaboration.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1: No Past. No Future. No Sun
    As revived as the classic Pumpkins sound is on Shiny and Oh So Bright, though, the album can’t quite shake the sense of superfluity endemic to reunion projects: There isn’t anything here that the band hasn’t already done before--and better.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mission Bell
    Mission Bell [is] a pleasant record, but Lee should be aiming for more than just "pleasant" by this point in his career.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Is That You in the Blue?
    Is That You in the Blue? is the kind of freewheeling, creative rock record that should make Romweber a key influence on yet another generation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Destroyed Room: B-Sides And Rarities
    The Destroyed Room is certainly more than a hastily cobbled together stocking stuffer for indie snobs, but it still kind of feels like one.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Detroit House Guests
    Adult succeeds here in crafting an unsettling musical experience--across which the familiar is recast in an uncanny new light--that's hell bent on subverting our beliefs.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Our Bright Future
    Chapman's songwriting is as sharp as ever, which makes it all the more unfortunate that the album's production is so lifeless.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    KEYS
    A compilation of the most successful tracks from both halves of Keys would have made for a slightly stronger album. As is, though, it serves as a testament to both Keys’s strengths and weaknesses as a singer-songwriter—and her willingness to expand beyond the boundaries of genre constraints.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mama, I'm Swollen
    Diehard fans will continue to bray for "The Ugly Organ 2," but Swollen features better songs, stronger playing, and Dylan-level lyrics, making it the band's most cohesive work to date.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet Earth
    While all three albums ["Musicology," "3121," and "Planet Earth"], at their best, contain precisely the sort of seasoned professionalism you wouldn't ever cite as an actual compliment, there remains a nostalgic pull that's no less electric for being completely anesthetized and overly rehearsed.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    X
    One of the most contemporary (and least pleasant) aspects of X is its scattershot production, which gives it the focus-grouped attention deficit disorder more typical of a Gwen Stefani record than one of Minogue's laser-honed disco-princess home runs.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Without Feathers
    What impresses about Without Feathers is the depth and liveliness that the group brings to it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Omni
    It's syrupy, heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, so slickly produced and acutely cornball that it has no logical place on the record of any semi-obscure, self-respecting indie rock band. And yet Omni remains intriguingly smooth and flip.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Different Gear, Still Speeding
    Judging this Beady Eye debut without any preconceptions based on their polarizing frontman-be they positive or negative-will be difficult, but the vocal performances and songwriting should go some way to endearing even the staunchest detractors to the all-swaggering, piquant Mancunian.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Crush Songs
    Boredom isn't the worst feeling an album can conjure; a sense of wasted opportunity and squandered potential is a wholly graver offense.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Blueprint 3
    The album is a hip-hop feast, for sure, filled to the brim with elite production and elite rapping, but it lacks the hungriness, the spirit, and the craziness that mark a classic album.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Transfixiation
    For a band so obsessed with death, and its erotic possibilities, they sound utterly alive on Transfixiation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    4:21 ... The Day After
    Far from perfect, 4:21…The Day After still manages to effectively trounce Method Man's previous record.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Versus
    Of course, the only people I could imagine getting any pleasure whatsoever from Versus's wretched collection of failed club-sex jams are those with enough bad taste to buy Raymond v. Raymond three or four times over.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In the Grace of Your Love
    If there's a major difference here, it's that the Rapture has never sounded so confident in what they're doing.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Kiss Land
    The problem with Kiss Land is that it fails on both fronts, presenting a musically static album that's also disturbingly backward on gender issues, with a sustained focus on degradation that no longer seems anything but vile.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Loved Me Back to Life
    Dion's cover of Janis Ian's rueful "At Seventeen" comes off less like a lament for childhood dreams that didn't come to pass and more like a lilting word of advice from someone old enough to know better, which is precisely the zone where the album excels: when Dion drops the act and embraces her manic, Hallmark card-brandishing guru of schmaltz.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rockstar
    To her credit, Parton still manages to make Rockstar sound and feel like a Dolly Parton album, thanks in large part to her distinctive twang. She and producer Kent Wells make some subtle changes to these songs, like a richer and deeper piano tone on Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” and denser lead guitar on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” though more inventive arrangements would have distinguished these versions from the originals.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pocketful of Sunshine
    Despite some attempts at quasi-uplift ('Freckles') and childhood nostalgia ('Backyard'), there's little here that's likely to reprise the slow-burning success of that inspirational smash ['Unwritten'].
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    L.A.X.
    With the Game's third and best album, LAX, which drops without the baggage of a high-profile beef, we learn more about who the rapper really is: a guy who loves hip-hop, from top to bottom, and is as comfortable giving shout-outs to Will Smith and Uncle Luke as he is to Wu Tang and NWA.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Here I Stand
    Usher always delivers musically, but his perpetual claims of excellence and of being on the "cutting edge" (though it's unclear by whose definition and compared to what), his music is almost always just one notch above mediocrity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ursa Major
    The formula is dependable and timeworn but ultimately successful, as Third Eye Blind follows the paint-by-numbers blueprint with stunning efficiency.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Avril Lavigne
    Avril Lavigne is filled with similar empty life-affirming mantras and boasts of rebelliousness. Lavigne has mined these themes with success in the past, but here the exploration feels forced, as if she's trying to capture an attitude, and craft a persona, that she no longer lives.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meds
    A version of Coldplay's X&Y for the Hot Topic set, Meds finds a successful band doing just a little to tinker with their proven formula--in this case, bombastic melodic hooks supporting straightforward, repetitive lyrical turns-of-phrase--and attempting to pass off a few too many soundalike tracks as thematic coherence.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love 2
    Consistently smooth to the point of tedium, Love 2 has the unruffled air of '50s bachelor-pad cool, often recalling Enoch Light and other space-age instrumentalists, but its overbearing electronic elements negate the organic feel it would otherwise inherit from those albums, leaving an impressively dispassionate patina with almost nothing underneath.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kid Kruschev
    Seven years after their debut, they remain both confined and defined by their early novelty as the twee pop group with the loud guitars.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Horses and High Heels
    As with most of her material, Horses and High Heels often sounds overblown and showy, but it identifies Faithfull's persistent ability to merge individual personality and musical connoisseurship.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    AIM
    AIM finds M.I.A. content to simply make an album, not craft a definitive statement to punctuate her career.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    9
    There are still enough swelling, string-laden climaxes, crisscrossing vocal lines, and cascading symphonies of voices to keep fans of O happy, but the album is significantly less unified.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Because the Internet
    Bloated with all manner of interstitial suites and assorted skit-like stopgaps, the 19-track Because the Internet could serviceably represent the titular web Glover finds so perplexing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Peeping Tom
    A collection of infantile, forgettable stripper anthems and not even guest spots from Rahzel or Kid Koala can keep this shit from sounding like Linkin Park.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Vision Valley
    The Vines ultimately come off as nothing more than a proficient Nirvana cover band, lacking a perspective of their own or a voice that really demands attention.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chinese Democracy
    While the band's label, fans and a handful of rock journalists would like to hail this album as the Second Coming of Rock, the reality is that Chinese Democracy is neither a musical resurrection nor the audio equivalent of Ishtar.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    We Don't Trust You
    On We Don’t Trust You, though, Future seems content to be set dressing for Metro’s elaborate production.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Here I Am
    The inherent blandness of Rowland's persona makes for too much roundly mediocre material.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Songs of Innocence
    From the nails-on-a-chalkboard solo of "Sleep Like a Baby Tonight" to the whining guitar strains of "Every Breaking Wave," the Edge's melodies and atmospheric licks are the real star of the album, which is otherwise marred by the kind of slick MOR pablum that plagued the band's last few efforts.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battle Born
    With their simultaneous emphasis on the pedal-to-the-metal triumphalism of rock's yesteryear and their ultimate submission to tomorrow's grinding machinery, the Killers' new album may as well be called Battle Born This Way.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dr. Dee
    Dr Dee indicates both Albarn's continuing interest in experimentation and his resolute songwriting skills, but doesn't always make for the easiest listen.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hungry Bird
    While having Clem Snide back is cause for excitement, the album that nearly killed the band for good probably wasn't the best choice for a comeback vehicle.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pink Tape
    There simply isn’t much in the way of staying power to the bleary “Patience” or any of the three throwaway bonus tracks beyond some absurdist lines and a few neat vocal melodies. But taken as a whole—something that’s frequently overlooked in a singles genre such as rap—this unabashedly creative album showcases its creator’s ever-developing abilities.
    • 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
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oblivion With Bells
    It clearly meshes with their previous incarnations and eventually emerges as a listenable album in its own right.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Light Of X
    Yet while thousands of tons of this dross are produced on a yearly basis, Richards's work stands safely above most, drawing on offbeat influences such as Mazzy Star and compositions that, despite sounding borderline soulless, are for the most part coldly dazzling.
    • 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
    • 60 Critic Score
    Here Lies Love
    The roster's promising and the concept is offbeat enough to be brilliant. The execution? It could have been a lot more inspired. Unless you come to the record already a die-hard fan of each and every one of the guest vocalists, you're going to find yourself skipping around in search of highlights.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Penny Sparkle
    For all its dreaminess, Penny Sparkle is clinical and almost always predictable, despite the exotic murmurs of lead singer Kazu Makino.
    • 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
    • 60 Critic Score
    Violet Cries
    Named after a grim Danish fairy tale, Esben and the Witch pursues a narrow course on their first album, Violet Cries, a morose, pitch-black update of the '80s dark-wave template.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Come Around Sundown
    Come Around Sundown buys Kings of Leon at least a little more time as the champions of mass-appeal Dixie garage rock.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Circus
    Wildly if transitorily enjoyable at turns, vacuous and ignorable at others, Circus doesn't quite feel like a comeback, but I'm sure Brit's not above merely bringing pre-comeback.
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