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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    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    MDNA
    MDNA is surprisingly cohesive despite its seven-plus producers.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Great Misdirect
    As the album stretches on, it's hard not to notice that some of the unbridled enthusiasm that made Alaska and Colors the heavy, heady trips that they were has been sacrificed. That's forgivable. The type of a maturation process that Between the Buried and Me has embarked on is never easy, and the record shows that few bands from rock's progressive edges pull it off.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head
    The one-time King of the South makes himself scarce on this anonymous and occasionally mawkish effort.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Everything
    Nothing else, however, on Grande's sophomore effort, My Everything, fulfills the promise of those two singles ["Problem" and "Bang Bang"].
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Funplex
    Funplex neither redefines nor sullies the band's sterling legacy, which is probably close to a best case scenario.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tre!
    On the whole, when not tedious or embarrassing, the remainder of Tre is simply not up to the task of proving why a third album in three months was necessary.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Super Extra Gravity
    Super Extra Gravity... sounds like the product of a young, fresh quintet that's got a whole lot of rock left in 'em.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    System
    Price's remix work has always been more impressive than his original productions and System is no exception.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Reality Killed The Video Star
    By downplaying Williams's formerly irrepressible charm, Reality simply doesn't make for an effective reintroduction to one of the U.S. pop market's biggest missed opportunities.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Three
    Three represents only an incremental progression, not the seismic shift of Voices, but it demonstrates the duo's ability to transform darkness into light, taking personal tragedy and shaping it into professional growth.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Minnesota
    It's the handful of tracks on which Jennings stretches beyond familiar troubadour conventions that are Minnesota's best.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Portamento
    The Drums are far too clever a band to suffer a sophomore slump, but Portamento does one better, dispelling any notion that they're merely the flavor of the month.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Take My Breath Away
    Take My Breath Away is a heavily populated but still carefully fashioned landscape, never feeling crowded and skipping effortlessly between lush ambience and driving techno.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dross Glop
    Unfortunately, the majority of Dross Glop's remixers fail to find any new inspiration in reworking the original material. The results are scattershot, meandering, awkward, and often boring.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Saga Continues
    Enjoying this album will depend on your tolerance for Wu-Tang at its most generic.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thunderheist
    It's erotic and in your face without being campy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love After War
    Though his feathery coos and whispers have long been his calling card, Thicke spends most of Love After War singing in full voice, with mixed results.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    9th Ward Pickin' Parlor
    A surprising delight.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brain Thrust Mastery
    Brain Thrust Mastery eschews the scenester party-and-sex themes of the band's sorta-breakthrough "With Love and Squalor" for more grown-up subject matter.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Permalight
    Permalight is a startling contrast in subdued grace and awkward severity, alternately rewarding and punishing as the band seeks to craft a new voice without entirely abandoning the old.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Big Dream
    Lynch may be devoting much of his time and passion to his new career as a musician, but The Big Dream still has a thin, larky feel, briefly amusing, consistently strange, but rarely resonant.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    On The Outside
    Nothing on On The Outside is truly awful--it's just, well, good, which these days, isn't quite enough to get the attention of a well and truly fickle nation.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Seeing Sounds
    To be fair, there aren't any real clunkers to be found on Seeing Sounds and lead single 'Everyone Nose (All the Girls Standing in Line for the Bathroom)' and album closer 'Laugh About It' are perfectly serviceable Neptunes tracks, but only two tunes, 'Spaz' and 'You Know What' are very visionary.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Head Carrier
    When not vainly trying to live up to their legacy and instead embracing middle-age, the Pixies end up doing a much better job of not tainting said legacy. Head Carrier's best moments are straightforward, midtempo, guitar-based alt-rock.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cheek to Cheek
    Gaga comes off more as a dilettante than an aficionado on Cheek to Cheek.... Bennett doesn't fare a whole lot better, his otherwise charming performances strained throughout. The pair's solo efforts, particularly Gaga's clumsy interpretation of Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" and Bennett's surprisingly pitchy rendition of Duke Ellington's "Sophisticated Lady," only serve to spotlight their shortcomings.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Working Girl
    A more sonically focused effort.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Weezer (Red Album)
    Weezer seems to have driven their old shtick into the ground so perfectly, it almost seems like they've purposely become tired and boring.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fire Away
    While their verses might be disappointingly lightweight this time out, Ozomatli provides more than enough substance where it counts.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Some People Have Real Problems
    Some People is stuffed to the rafters with love songs but they're never precious or cloying, even when the arrangements soar to rousing string/brass/choir-laden climaxes, or when the lyrics are comprised of little more than a string of clichés .
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sam's Town
    The Killers may have grown a heart for Sam's Town, but they also grew even bigger egos, and it's unlikely that the album's bombast and self-importance will convert any new fans.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pacific Daydream
    His oddball pop-culture references and fondness for clichés can be charming amid wailing electric guitars, but taking center stage, they too often fall flat.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Colonia
    Colonia is what pop music might have sounded like in the era of gaslights and guillotines.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fluorescence
    The musical bliss is short-lived, and the rest of Fluorescence is pretty much the musical equivalent of throwing darts at a wall full of sticky notes while blindfolded and drunk: Some happy accidents, but mostly a forgettable, sloppy mess.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paradise [EP]
    Paradise is longer [than Born To Die], but less essential, more a summary of her persona than an attempt at developing it.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Talk That Talk
    Talk That Talk is pretty easily the worst Rihanna album yet.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big TV
    It's a pleasant enough listen, and the hooks are plentiful, but White Lies don't appear to want to completely engage their audience in the album's prevalent, genuinely important message that contemporary success can be deceptively shallow when sought under duress.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    True Romance
    Unapologetically indulging her distinctive genre tastes, True Romance largely proves that Estelle's talents were being too encumbered by the demands of record execs and producer John Legend, delivering a fleet 45 minutes of music that sounds more true to her West London upbringing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Emancipation Of Mimi
    But whatever the songs lack, they make up for in restraint--brevity keeps you wanting more, which is really Mimi's virtue.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Vicissitude
    At every turn, the album serves only to reinforce the fact that Chapman isn't only firmly, almost blindly stuck in the previous decade, but that his music's long-overdue expiration date is the least of its problems.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    She Is Coming [EP]
    The EP’s dubious employment of hip-hop tropes and graphic sexual metaphors reaches its nadir on ballroom-inspired “Cattitude,” part boast track and part ode to Miley’s female prowess.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Business Is Business
    Even if one were to dismiss Business Is Business as nothing more than an anthology of loosies, Thug’s ostensible leftovers, like the brassy “Uncle M” and heart-wrenching ballads like “Jonesboro,” are still electric. In this sense, the album’s greatest strength is keeping things strictly business.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Til The Casket Drops
    Clipse seemed much more comfortable on Road, nesting inside the work of others. Casket provides no such comfort, finding them without their usual subject matter or a strong musical backbone, resulting in a clear sense of discomfort.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My December
    Though "My December" cuts much of the adult contemporary-style balladry that marred her first two releases (but also displayed more than just her shouting vocal range), the album still finds Clarkson further exploring different facets of her voice.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Introducing Joss Stone
    It's the rare album that values vocal talent and production prowess with equal measure—and, for the most part, it succeeds.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ye
    Ye‘s emotional claustrophobia is at times effective: As a chronicle of living with mental illness, this is Kanye’s most unsparing work to date. ... But Ye just feels unfinished, as if he wanted to avoid another debacle like the rollout of the also-unfinished The Life of Pablo and turned in a rough draft to make deadline. Unlike Pusha’s Daytona, which is all muscle and sinew, Ye feels like a mix of the weakest moments from The Life of Pablo.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sound of a Woman
    Sound of a Woman quickly reveals itself to be a crafty bait and switch. With its scratchy trip-hop beat, soulful vocals, and sparsely placed keyboards and synthesized string stabs, "Losin' My Mind" is more Blue Lines than Big Fun, while the Jessie Ware-esque electro-soul ballads "So Deep" and "Vietnam" find the singer dabbling in drum n' bass and freestyle, respectively.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Golden
    While country signifiers abound, from foot-stomping to fiddling, the songs on Golden also smartly juxtapose contemporary pop elements like soaring synth hooks and pitched-up vocals.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Erotic Reruns
    Erotic Reruns is a collection of ultimately benign love songs, as the eroticism proposed by the album’s title is glaringly absent across 29 scant minutes.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Made In China
    A confused, sloppy, childish, conflicted mess.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Farmer's Daughter
    Her debut album, Farmer's Daughter, is consistent with the singer-songwriter's public persona, then, because it finds her attempting to rise above production values that are fundamentally at odds with what she does well.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Maybach Music Group Presents: Self Made, Vol. 3
    Perhaps just a little more scattered and weak than the previous two installments, the Rick Ross-governed Self Made, Vol. 3 achieves little out of the ordinary, while providing a few solid tracks that stand out from the general unevenness on display.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mistake, Mistake, Mistake, Mistake
    The rare techno album that's worth digging into.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Babel
    While the quartet may be perfectly competent musicians, though, their fundamental conservatism plays against them on Babel, making for an album that's entirely too familiar and safe.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    American Central Dust
    While frontman Jay Farrar was instrumental in defining the alt-country scene, the problem with Dust is that, in the intervening years since Son Volt first rose to prominence, that scene has been bogged down by countless dreary, soundalike albums and an exhausting self-seriousness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Widow's Weeds
    Widow’s Weeds may lack the arena-sized atmospherics and anthemic party songs of past Silversun Pickups efforts, but with each additional listen the hooks sink in deeper and the melodies stay longer in your head. It’s catchy, heartfelt, and far less forgettable than…what were those previous two albums named again?
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lonely Avenue
    Lonely Avenue definitively exfoliates its ersatz-'70s, one-off joint-effort stance; more than anything, it's proof that pop can push back against middle-class maturity woes with both rhetorical and diatonic thickness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Feed the Beast
    While it’s admirable that Petras is willing to show her vulnerable side on the midtempo 808 ballad “Thousand Pieces” and the bubbly “Minute,” Feed the Beast plays it safe compared to Petras’s audacious Slut Pop EP.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kiss
    Carly Rae Jespen's strengths, which have been roundly declared adequate by the immense popularity of her single "Call Me Maybe," are her simplicity and directness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rewolf
    Chikudate can reign uninterrupted, taking center stage to the sounds of humbled guitars, trickling bells, and the charm of her own lyrical whimsy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Didn't It Rain
    If Laurie hasn't produced something new under the sun, he nonetheless brings more light to certain dark places of the songbook than all too many American interpreters.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hands All Over
    Hands All Over won't fulfill Levine's ambition to redefine Maroon 5's identity: If anything, it only steers the band further from the potential suggested by their 2002 debut, Songs About Jane.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Age Of Miracles
    Those songs are all fine enough for what they are, but they don't offer any significant variations on the meditations on love and aging that Carpenter has released for the better part of two decades.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beat The Devil's Tattoo
    At its finest, the album serves as the ideal soundtrack for a fleet of lonely, grizzled bikers lost on a desert highway: slow-rolling and hardened, simultaneously seething, brooding, and wistful, and armed with the pride of vagrancy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wildflower
    Crow typically does "melancholy" with panache, so more's the pity that Wildflower often sounds outright dull.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I'm with You
    The arrangements have a tendency to rely on Flea's basslines to compensate for Frusciante's absence, but there's still enough zip and zeal in the stronger tracks to affirm the Chili Peppers' relevance in the modern musical climate.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Yes, It's True
    The album's charms are entirely rooted in the familiar, and while that makes it go down smoothly, it doesn't give one any reason to listen again once the last notes fade away.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fly Yellow Moon
    Perhaps deemed too conventional for release with Guillemots, Fly Yellow Moon benefits greatly from its uncomplicated scope and stripped-down recording style.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sun, Sun, Sun
    Sun, Sun, Sun is a likeable enough album, sure, but it leaves only the most faint of impressions.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Double Up
    Unsaved by anything resembling an acceptable musical hook, Kelly's lyrics are uniformly dumb.
    • 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.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eat Me, Drink Me
    Eat Me, Drink Me is a bona fide creative rebirth.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    TLC
    TLC succeeds only to the extent that it captures the sound and style of the group's golden era, but absent of Left Eye's signature swagger; though T-Boz and Chilli are in fine voice, the group's success largely relied on the delicate balance of all three members.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    X
    Aside from the standout club banger "Add Me In," which is steeped in arithmetic and trigonometry metaphors, and "101," which finds Brown doing "101 on the 101," the album's lyrics largely eschew mathematical objects in favor of soul-baring like "Autumn Leaves" and sex talk like "Songs on 12 Play," which likens a girl to a song from the titular R. Kelly album.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings
    The electric guitar interludes sound obligatory, particularly when paired with lyrics that don't approach immediate or visceral
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Laws of Illusion
    Laws of Illusion sounds both effortless and effort-less, and McLachlan has proven that she's capable of more compelling work.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Donkey
    CSS's sophomore effort, Donkey, is one of the year's biggest disappointments, then, because it jettisons most of what made the band interesting (that outsider perspective on global pop culture) in favor of a far more simpleminded, one-note focus on partying.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Haywire
    Haywire is pure vanilla, pleasant enough but not adding anything of note to Turner's catalogue beyond a couple of new singles for his eventual greatest-hits anthology.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fated
    Fated is limited in scope, frustratingly laconic, and--as befits a journeyman--somewhat derivative, but it's never boring.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Need You Now
    Shaw's production and songwriting credits have long been highlighted by an intuitive approach to pop-country, but Worley pushes the group's sound in a soulless, lite-rock direction that lacks any semblance of character or distinction.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Da Realist
    Without a distinguishing voice or idea, Realist feels like the mold from which better rap albums are made, a blank form woefully void of substance or flavor.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fly International Luxurious Art
    Fly International Luxurious Art maintains some level of general interest through a stacked guest list, with visitors as varied as Snoop Dogg, A$AP Rocky, Busta Rhymes, and 2 Chains, but none of them do more than distract from the overall atmosphere of paltry unevenness.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Enemy/Lover
    Given a wider range of material to show off the group's considerable strengths (Jones is a powerful and expressive vocalist, and the band's control of texture and ambience is exquisite), Dreamers of the Ghetto could have produced a much more compelling debut.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Nextwave Sessions [EP]
    Eight years after their debut, this is still the sound of an adolescent band that, despite its persistence in tackling adult topics, hasn't yet found a way of approaching them in an adult manner.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Out Of Control
    While Out of Control is by no means Girls Aloud's best album (their third effort, "Chemistry," is probably still their crowning glory), it is nonetheless not only one of the best pop albums of 2008.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    He Was King
    He Was King is tasty candy, to be sure. But it's the sort of candy that only makes you want something more substantial. Like cake.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Born Free
    It's not so much the shift in style that hampers Born Free, but rather the trite subject matter and gormless storytelling that Rock so keenly adopts.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Piece by Piece
    Clarkson has been mining this territory since before Swift even landed her first record deal, and songs that should ostensibly inspire nostalgia (like the pointedly titled aerobics workout "Nostalgic") instead feel like they just rolled off a conveyor belt.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Everything Is Borrowed
    Everything in the entire album is really just catching up to Skinner's words.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Not Your Kind of People
    Not Your Kind of People adheres so doggedly to formula that it often sounds dated... There's no indication that the band has evolved much.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Higher Than The Eiffel
    The aforementioned hangovers, though, feel like just that, overly morose and saccharinely slushy numbers that sound labored and fail to give Higher Than the Eiffel the worthwhile breather it needs following those breakneck party numbers.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pocket Symphony
    The worst of Pocket Symphony is dull and overly familiar; the best is familiar and gently gorgeous.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Great Gatsby [Music from Baz Luhrmann's Film]
    Despite few-and-far-between curveballs from the xx (the spare "Together") and Nero ("Into the Past," which clearly aches to be included on the next Nicolas Winding Refn movie), The Great Gatsby speaks on Duke and Ella's behalf when it says, "It don't mean a thing." Period.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: Catching Fire [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    The album's old-guard pros sadly don't lend much more to the proceedings than their younger counterparts.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Weight's on the Wheels
    As presented, the overly peppy pop production and the homeroom poetry of a lyricist whose either trying way too hard or not nearly hard enough to be clever become mutually reinforcing aggravations, and The Weight's on the Wheels ends up as one of the most annoying records in recent memory.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Me vs. Myself
    In the end, A Boogie plays it too safe, and in the process, ultimately proves how accurate the album’s title really is.
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