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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    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Under The Iron Sea
    What they have done, to their credit, is take the best elements from those bands--Radiohead's soaring melodies, U2's scope and volume, Coldplay's dogged earnestness--and combine them into something that, for much of Under The Iron Sea's running time, is a perfectly respectable alternative to, say, the likes of Train or The Goo Goo Dolls or to Coldplay's comparatively bland X&Y.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battlefield
    As nice as it is to hear Sparks continuing to dabble in dance-pop, though, one wonders if it would have been a smarter move in terms of career longevity to try to build on the urban audience she started to cultivate with 'No Air.'
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cee Lo's Magic Moment
    The dark songster offers a bright disc full of pudding-rich arrangements and a number of worthy soul hits--just with a little more twinkly tambourine.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Last Night
    These songs aren't as transcendent as a Chemical Brothers comedown, but they'll suffice until the Chems reunite with Beth Orton.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flavors Of Entanglement
    "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" was emotionally complex but never without a nerve; the new Alanis, it seems, has many things to say, but they're all half-formed and stuck inside her head.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time To Die
    The hurtling pace the Dodos maintain and the complexity they manage to fill into these tight spaces is fascinating, at times amazing, fitfully matching complexity with speed.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Red River Blue
    Red River Blue may be a significant step forward for Shelton, but he's going to have to be far more consistent in his song choices and steer clear of reductive "I'm so country" shtick like "Good Ole Boys" if he hopes to keep pace with the quality of his wife's albums.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    MPLSound
    On an individual song-for-song basis, the lyrical hooks are even shallower than they are on LOtUSFLOW3R.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Vices & Virtues
    If you were expecting some kind of creative transformation from the shakeup, this new album may be something of a disappointment, as Urie and drummer Spencer Smith return to the skittish, bombastic pop-rock of their debut.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    MGMT
    The swampy, claustrophobic MGMT is never as interesting or smart as the crowd-pleasing sing-alongs on Oracular Spectacular.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    IV Play
    IV Play may not always hit that high bar, but the artist's persistence and perfectionism are clear, and the results bear as pure of a pedigree as ever.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Xenophanes
    The feel is still sketchy and somewhat improvised, but there's no sense that these songs are simply impressionistic doodles.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Strength In Numbers
    You could say Strength in Numbers is all bark and no bite, except there's not any bark either.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1612 Underture
    1612 Underture is most effective when the curious synth tones play over quips about poky limestone villages and "suppers for the worms and the owls."
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    GhostDeini The Great
    So, there you go, Ghostface, you've given us time to reflect on your weird, surprisingly lengthy career while enjoying some choice and not-so-choice songs from your panoply of albums.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Orca
    Orca may be enjoyable in the moment, but it doesn’t have staying power.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sidewalks
    Matt and Kim has lost a bit of their musical soul in attempting to reconcile their rough, campy sound with mass-appeal polish, and as a result, Sidewalks lacks a considerable amount of the bite of its predecessor.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Finally Rich
    There's also a joyless and dispiriting quality to the music, something soul crushing in how the most backward elements of rap culture have coalesced into one hardened teenager.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stronger
    With the exception of the obvious electronic manipulation used on "Mr. Know It All," Clarkson's performances on Stronger are more consistently lived-in and evocative than on any of her previous efforts.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crazy Clown Time
    When the album works, it's truly something to behold, a marvelously twisted effort that acts as a corollary to the warped images Lynch has been creating for years.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Manifesto
    The album does have some decent moments though. It's just unfortunate that they're all exhausted by the record's 20-minute mark
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Born to Die
    One of the more cohesive pop albums in recent memory.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sugar
    The band shows range, but there's never a moment where all the elements cohere into something completely unique. Even with more professional-sounding production and songwriting, they still can't escape their influences.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Feel That Fire
    Having good taste in collaborators and influences doesn't make up for how often Bentley repeats himself here though, and it isn't enough to keep Feel That Fire from being more than a tremendous disappointment.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Christmas In The Heart
    Profoundly weird but still cozy, Christmas in the Heart paints an appealing holiday picture: chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost scratching at your ears.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Big
    Unfortunately (and not surprisingly), Gray's already weathered voice is more worn than ever; she struggles to reach and sustain notes that should be comfortably within her range.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stupid Love
    Smith's latest, Stupid Love, goes a long way toward correcting those earlier mistakes, and it easily stands as her most accomplished, most substantial record.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bittersweet World
    Bittersweet World is another step in the right direction for Simpson; now if only she'd learn that real rule breakers don't write songs about it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ...And Star Power
    The album's third side, titled "Scream: Journey Through Hell," isn't quite that, but it's a mostly abrasive collage of disjointed hard-rock riffs that provide only very intermittent pleasures. In one sense, that stretch of music is a detriment to an otherwise astonishing piece of work; in another, like so many double albums of the past, it's all part of the ride.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    There Are Rules
    While the style of rock for which they're best known might now be passé, the Get Up Kids pushes themselves entirely too far outside their comfort zone on There Are Rules, resulting in an album that is at turns strident and awkward.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mumps, Etc.
    Mumps, Etc. is an assured, thematically united set.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Selling My Soul
    Well-executed, fresh music from a member of Wu-Tang is always welcome, but perfunctory projects stuffed with filler are never a good look.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Abnormally Attracted To Sin
    But even with its bloated running time, Sin is more thematically satisfying and sonically adventurous than anything Amos has recorded in years.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beautiful Trauma
    Beautiful Trauma's neat construction renders the album less than the sum of its parts, but individual songs work well enough, thanks in no small part to Pink's personality and charisma.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is What the Truth Feels Like
    It’s easy to chastise aging pop stars for chasing trends or trying to recapture past glories, but those efforts here are thrown into sharp relief by the maturity of the album’s first half.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We're All Somebody from Somewhere
    Tyler and his collaborators manage to distill the alleged death of arena rock and its rebirth as modern-day pop country into a 55-minute runtime. Unfortunately, in equal measure, it's also a testament to the depths to which Tyler is willing to superficially pander in order to remain commercially relevant.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Too Much Information
    In the past, the absence of an edifyingly crowd-pleasing anthem like that from a Maximo Park album might have signaled a less-than-essential entry in the band's discography; in its place, however, resides a tonal consistency and musical flow not found since A Certain Trigger.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beautiful Imperfection
    The compartmentalization of its exotic elements confirms Beautiful Imperfection as a ploy launched at a specific target market, listeners who want to be gently and non-confrontationally challenged, able to enjoy Asa's spongy neo-soul with the stranger portions served on the side.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Haiku from Zero
    Pervasive throughout is the sense that yearning for the unobtainable is its own reward, and the band successfully imbues Haiku from Zero with the notion that both pleasure and pain remind us that we’re alive.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Emotional Traffic
    Emotional Traffic only works in its moments of restraint and relative good taste, and those are exceedingly rare.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am...Sasha Fierce
    I Am...Sasha Fierce is an admirable vie for artistic credibility (and for a last-ditch revival of the long-player format) but one that is muddled by the fact that the album is being offered in two configurations.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Foundling
    Gray tries to bring some color to the album with his terrific, weathered tenor, but there's only so much he can do in performing material this staid.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Music Speaks
    One can only hope she escapes the pitfalls of being a non-songwriting R&B singer in an inhospitable pop scene and finds collaborators who know what to do with a good old-fashioned powerhouse.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    2093
    Repetition is a big one, and not just in the sense of saying the same word over and over again—which Yeat does on “Psychocainë,” whose chorus has him shuffling through several permutations of the phrase “I forgot”—but in songs that, though they’re certainly cutting edge when compared to what else is out there, begin to blur together over time. But while that prevents 2093 from sounding quite as forward-minded as its title suggests, Yeat is finally tapping into a style he can confidently call his own.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Shine On
    You can practically hear the energy draining away as the album progresses and one song slides into another, indistinguishable by either melody or lyric.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Untitled
    The only thing that prevents Untitled from dissolving in its own moisture is Kelly's consummately unhinged personality.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eclipse
    While Twin Shadow's first two efforts were defined by an uneasy balance between gaudy theatrics and finely detailed production, most of the songs here lack that innate tension, catchy but unsatisfyingly thin.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In the Lonely Hour
    Just when you've started to grow weary of Smith's pity party, it's over. And there are enough moments of genuine musical, lyrical, and vocal virtuosity and soul to crack even the most hardened listener's icy heart.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Wretched Virile Lore
    For better or worse, though, the album illuminates qualities in Hardcore Will Never Die that would have been easy to either miss completely or conveniently ignore, making it a worthwhile supplement to an already exceptional album.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Before I Self Destruct
    Before I Self Destruct plays as a prudent step back. It's not that 50 has suddenly become terrifying, but the album possesses a sense of latent menace that's been left unexplored since his early mixtapes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pray IV Reign
    His work is still glaringly standard, all puffed-up machismo and stock sexual banter.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Last Slimeto
    Rather than follow a traceable narrative or thematic through line, the album merely conjures a series of—albeit passionately relayed—images of love, lust, and violence. Fortunately, these snapshots cohere just enough, driven by unceasing and often exhilarating geysers of emotion.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Her Loss
    Uneven. ... There’s simply too little give and take between this pairing to justify calling this a mutually beneficial partnership.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Press Play
    Diddy still doesn't have an original bone in his body or a fresh idea in his head, and he relies on his previously successful formulas... but damn if it doesn't actually work.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    In Your Dreams
    In Your Dreams indulges in some of Nicks's worst tendencies as a songwriter and is slathered in chintzy, dated production values.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Oh Land
    Oh Land's cinematic arrangements bring Janelle Monáe's ambitious approach to pop music to mind, but tracks like "Wolf & I" and "Lean" draw a bit too heavily from the trip-hop playbook (it doesn't help that Fabricius sounds a lot like Björk) and, however well-excecuted they may be, end up sounding derivative.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am the West
    Judging by moments like these, when Cube's performance is allowed to take center stage, I Am the West becomes an engaging hip-hop record.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Other Side of Zero
    "Worn Out Tune" says it all, with its bluesy but not-quite-bleak atmosphere, and Ziman happily embracing "the ones we just can't get enough of." The band wants all their songs to have this quality, but every track on the album sounds like they were labored over so carefully that spontaneity lost every battle against precision.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Yes!
    Unfortunately, his wide-lens worldview leaves Yes! feeling like the musical equivalent of a G-rated sitcom.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Draw The Line
    The knock on Gray has always been that he's a bit boring, and Line, despite some genuinely nice moments and affecting vocal turns, isn't likely to change anyone's mind on that point.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Raise Vibration
    Raise Vibration's more serious shortcoming is its lyrics, which stumble whenever they reach for grand proclamations on the state of the world.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Two
    The words are flatter, the music is more generically attractive, and maybe we're all getting a little too old for this club.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Someday World
    Someday World never devolves into Tin Machine-style disaster, but it rarely manages to realize its collaborative potential either.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Turning the Mind
    Whether creative flaw or conscious production choice, the uneven clip of this and other tracks prevents Turning the Mind from achieving the spatial, bliss-ridden freedom on which shoegaze thrives. Instead, Chapman pulls the reins back one time too many.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cyr
    The singer’s m.o. has long been to cram each project with every creative idea he has—an approach that, though effective during the Pumpkins’s heyday, now largely results in diminishing returns. It would be time better spent fleshing out songs that are too often merely shadows of ideas.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sing Into My Mouth
    More than simply a joint stopgap for these indie heavyweights, Sing Into My Mouth serves, like the DJ-Kicks and LateNightTales series, as a musical bibliography for curious fans, and a superbly entertaining one at that.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amputechture
    Amputechture shows a band honing their eruptive sound and bringing it into tight focus for the first time, routinely pushing their music to the wall without ever risking a breach.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The R.E.D. Album
    The profusion of guests and mania for exhibiting street hardness sometimes makes The R.E.D. Album feel unfocused and exhausting.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Closer to the Truth
    It's with some disappointment, but not much surprise, to discover that the singer's 26th studio album, Closer to the Truth, not only perpetuates this exhausted (and exhausting) formula, but fails to attempt to reinvent it in even the most minute ways.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Knew You When
    When Seger sticks to growling out his lyrics over jagged riffs and a relentless beat, as he does on the driving “Runaway Train” and the synth-driven “The Highway,” he proves that craft can be rewarding in its own right, and that he still excels at creating emotional investment in something as tried and true as barreling, locomotive rock.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Quicken The Heart
    For an album that so readily cruises along on autopilot, the absence of a satisfying lyrical presence keeps it resolutely sandwiched in the middle of the pile.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ghost Stories
    Although incumbent on its source material, Ghost Stories avoids wholly rote repetition by porting a modicum of the strangeness and innovation of other artists into its own body, despite Martin's clunky writing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unapologetic
    While compelling on its own terms, Rihanna never seems to figure out that being Unapologetic isn't the same thing as picking fights on the dance floor.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Walk It Off
    An uneven album that just barely avoids the sophomore slump.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Black Panties
    The onslaught of bawdy imagery eventually grows tedious, but there's something compelling about witnessing one man's psyche laid so completely bare, a crazed prophet whipped into a frenzy by the ecstasy of his own sin.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sleep Through The Static
    Sleep Through the Static is yet another collection of somnolent, semi-sociopolitical-themed folk-rock in the tradition of '70s AM radio.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros
    The album's adventurous musical scope serves to further expand the mythos behind Ebert's ego-fueled, drug-addled, socio-religious musical experiment.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Sound of the Life of the Mind
    There's a pall of maturity over The Sound of the Life of the Mind that both unifies and wrecks it. It rejects, if only halfheartedly, the nerdy, masculine piss that once made the band such guilty fun.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    DJ-Kicks
    Despite its strict adherence to traditional and relatively straightforward dance aesthetics, the album is often showy, flaunting both its nods to authenticity and an impressive showcase of the genre's low-tech production style.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mix-Up
    For an album that truly has nothing to say and risks suggesting nothing more need be said, The Mix-Up sounds merely satisfactory now, but I can't wait until some turntablist uses it to drop the science.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Doo-Wops and Hooligans
    Doo-Wops & Hooligans kicks up no fuss, and shortchanges on its promise of both doo-wop and hooliganism.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mirror Eye
    The band takes this gradual structure and spreads it over songs wreathed in recurring patterns, echo effects, and unintelligible chanting voices, resulting in music that's densely circular but moves, slowly and elegantly, with all the beauty of a wisp of smoke.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Discipline
    At 22 tracks, Discipline is anything but disciplined, but it's also Janet's most cohesive album in a while.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In The Maybe World
    In The Maybe World is an accessible, if lyrically opaque, work that should please fans of avant-pop that doesn't sound remotely like any of the other cerebral chanteuses out there.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bangerz
    Bangerz is a personal, idiosyncratic effort that finds equal rewards in twentysomething indulgence and inspiring "be yourself" mantras.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    LotusFlow3r
    LOtUSFLOW3R only occasionally transcends the same anesthetized gloss that gummed up "3121" and "Planet Earth," both of which feature stronger songs, not that you'd know it beyond all that polish.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dignity
    Dignity is bland by any standard.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blackout
    For every hot, of-the-moment track, though, there's something like the nonsensical 'Hot As Ice,' which was co-penned by the thoroughly talentless T-Pain and might have worked two albums ago but just sounds retrograde here.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Polly Scattergood
    Beyond threatening suicide and playing coy with whispered vocals, Scattergood fidgets with the bad girl/innocent child dynamic, the juxtaposition of which is just tired enough to bear obvious, but still creepy, dividends.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    These Systems Are Failing
    While a curious, if somewhat jarring, departure from 2013's serene Innocents, this distortion-laden album too often blurs into cacophony and muddled by passive-aggressive calls for anarchy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    For Me It's You
    "Get Out" and "Am I Reaching You Now" strive for massive arena-rock grandeur, and, while Train is slick and professional enough a band to pull that off, what prevents the album from working even as marginally as X&Y and certainly not as well as The Constantines' Tournament Of Hearts is the banality of the songs' lyrics.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Legendary Weapons
    Legendary Weapons respects the Wu-Tang ethos and legacy without doing anything to enhance it, constantly regurgitating buzz words and vintage Wu signifiers in an attempt to achieve authenticity.
    • 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Later...When the TV Turns To Static
    Later isn't quite the world-conquering rock opus their debut turned out to be, but it proves that Glasvegas has effectively shaken off their second-album hangover.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Brass Knuckles
    Brass Knuckles sounds less like the product of a fighter who's ready to go back into the ring than one who's stalling for time.
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