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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per page
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Britney Jean
    Despite the absence of longtime producer Max Martin and his associates, the album is a surprisingly retrograde affair, with midtempo tracks marred by dated production and vocals that hark back to the days when Brit was selling 10 million.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Midnight Memories
    The tracks may recall "Pour Some Sugar on Me," but their lyrics are still all "I'm not scared of love/'Cause when I'm not with you I'm weaker," so essentially the album's potentially nastiest tracks come off as a glorified Halloween costume act. More believable are the moments when they lay off the hard sell.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stitches
    If every Califone album is little more than the continued assurance that they're incapable of releasing music that's not exceptional, then Stitches is just as good, just as wonderfully mature and finely crafted and lyrically sophisticated, as the band's very best.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Baptized
    It sounds like Daughtry's been listening to a lot of Train and EDM, or at least the band's manager has, because the tempos are a bit peppier than the normal plodding 80bpm post-grunge yawning we're used to, and all of it is slathered with super-slick, edge-sanding modern-pop production, including the surprisingly liberal use of Auto-Tune.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cupid Deluxe
    Cupid Deluxe picks up where that track ["Everything Is Embarrassing"] left off: Blood Orange's sophomore effort chronicles alienation and broken romance with slow, melancholic, '90s-gazing jams.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chance of Rain
    There's a sketchbook quality to the album, a formlessness that it never quite escapes, nor seems to want to. But there are worse things to do, Halo knows, than to get lost in the clouds for a while.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Julia with Blue Jeans On
    The album puts Krug front and center, armed with nothing but piano and voice. It's a ballsy move, but it pays off in spades.
    • 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
    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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Free Your Mind
    Considering their rather straightforward musical blueprint, every Cut Copy album is a bit of a recycle job, but Free Your Mind seems excessively so, almost to the point of motorized lifelessness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ARTPOP
    It's Artpop's most naked, straightforward pop moments that are the album's most redemptive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Matangi
    Matangi again establishes M.I.A. as one of the most fascinating figures in modern music, but the personal voice underlying her material remains aggravatingly half-baked.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Marshall Mathers LP 2
    The album's production offers little that's new. Dr. Dre and Rick Rubin have crafted, or at least enabled, a few too many of the power-ballad slow jams that Eminem has grown increasingly fond of, alongside several guitar-driven anthems that come on as subtle as Jock Jams. Eminem is no one's hack, though, and the album has tantalizing moments of vintage performance.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wrapped in Red
    Any of these, as well as the retro title track, would make welcome additions to shopping-mall playlists, but it's the album's lead single, "Underneath the Tree," which recalls Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" in theme, tone, and structure, that's likely to become Clarkson's very own contemporary standard.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night Time, My Time
    Night Time, My Time might just be the sort of gaunt, darkly painted neurosis needed to combat popular music's deluge of silly and crude self-affirmations.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rapor [EP]
    Grossi's ability to deftly assimilate these more pop-oriented artists into his oeuvre is a testament to his growth since You Are All I See, resulting in his most confident release to date.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Reflektor
    The band certainly hasn't left rock behind, but they've found a way to push beyond a sense of exhaustion with the resources that the genre has to offer, while at the same time reflecting on the tenuousness of interpersonal connection in an age of hyper-evolving technology.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lousy with Sylvianbriar
    Lousy with Sylvianbriar is, quite simply, a weary album.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love to Love You Donna
    The lesson isn't so much "don't mess with perfection," but rather "don't bother trying to gild the lily of genius. To uneven ends, the collection of newly commissioned remixes in the tribute compilation Love to Love You Donna dance around that notion.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Prism
    She largely sticks to her tried-and-true pop template, each song tailor-made for mass consumption with mixed results.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shulamith
    Shulamith is a much more cohesive and self-assured effort [than its debut].
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New
    While the brave-faced, sunny music that defines the album's back half may be as contrived as his jolly public persona, it's the touches of humanizing anxiety that make New significant, revealing active signs of creative life.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bitter Rivals
    While "24" might be the best song Sleigh Bells have penned to date.... The rest of the album doesn't fare so well, and like the proverbial Potemkin village, its bravado is illusory, its songs precarious, one-dimensional façades that sag under anything more than a passing listen.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Static
    Whereas Cults' debut was more carefree in its breezy melodies, Static has a heavier heart, presenting a band with not only a better understanding of their music, but of each other as human beings.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beautiful Rewind
    Even though Beautiful Rewind is a call to dance music's past, it's the contemporary, more experimental sounds that establish the album as a standout in both the Four Tet oeuvre and a growing collection of dance albums that pay homage to the past.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magpie and the Dandelion
    Too many edges have been sanded off the brothers' music, and whether the blame lies with Rubin's influence or the accelerated writing pace, the result is an album devoid of the band's usual charming lyrics and adroit melodies.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Uncanney Valley
    It's an album that, smartly, neither embraces the past as empty nostalgia nor ignores the events of the past 12 years.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lightning Bolt
    Years removed from the raw emotion and desperate appetites of youth, Pearl Jam has slipped into alt-rock elder statesmanship as one would a comfortable old sweater. And as Lightning Bolt mostly attests, it's a decent look for them.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wishbone
    She's a prop to this glittering material, only nominally more prominent than the music that backs her, and that lack of a defining voice is a major problem for an album that floats by like a pleasant dream.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Name Is My Name
    Like any rapper, Pusha is still heavily dependent on the talent surrounding him, and these connections keep things on an even keel, with mostly strong production work presented throughout.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Interiors
    It takes only one listen to realize the album's title refers not to any physical place, but instead, those intimate mental spaces that contain the ideas that become art and music and other acts of human creativity, spaces that Mesirow taps into with uncommon regularity.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bangerz
    Bangerz is a personal, idiosyncratic effort that finds equal rewards in twentysomething indulgence and inspiring "be yourself" mantras.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Days Are Gone
    Because the surface is so smooth, it takes a listen or two to discover how little depth lies beneath it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Move in Spectrums
    Not until "Hand Over Hand" does the band let lazier atmospherics trump their talent for catchy songcraft, with the song never quite building to anything resembling the memorable melodies of the album's highlights.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pure Heroine
    The nihilist pop of Pure Heroine makes a strong case for the less-is-more maxim. What's left is a remarkably unpretentious and almost raw set of vignettes mostly powered by Lorde's modest, affectation-free performances.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The 20/20 Experience 2 of 2
    Ultimately, 2 of 2 doesn't so much eclipse its predecessor as it settles into the format more believably.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Circles Super Bon Bon Sleepless How Many Cans? True Dreams of Wichita Monster Man Mr. Bitterness Maybe I’ll Come Down St. Louise Is Listening I Miss t
    Everything Soul Coughing once made darkly curious and subversive has become predictably benign, but despite its affability, Circles Super Bon Bon... can't quite shake the obvious negativity of its creator, who seems far more interested in tearing down the old rather than building something new, rendering the album a completely superfluous labor of hatred.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Weird Sister
    The playful and passionate Weird Sister is the natural, exhilarating sound of influences--shoegaze, hardcore, riot grrrl--being assembled in new ways.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing Was the Same
    The album isn't perfect, but it draws energy from that imperfection, further establishing a persona driven by Drake's still-developing conflict between assurance and hesitation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bones of What You Believe
    While the album has its fair share of sweet spots, the handful of capable melodies never quite balances out its bizarre impulses or the utter lack of thematic unity.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mechanical Bull
    The band is just about out of transgressive fury, but they manage to muster enough rigor and discipline to keep Mechanical Bull kicking.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is...
    While most of the concerns expressed in This Is... seem wafer-thin, the innovative production and diamond-hard songcraft suggest something else entirely. Icona Pop has few equals in the current landscape when it comes to immaculately crafted radio-dance music.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wise Up Ghost and Other Songs
    The result is an album that pops with attitude, relaxed but never lazy, a groove-driven album structured around Quest's minimalist drum attack, Kirk's old-school rhythm n' blues licks and wahs, some Curtis Mayfield-style string arrangements, and a lead singer whose voice sounds oddly youthful, as though channeled from his Imposters days.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ski Mask
    Perhaps Ski Mask's greatest virtue is that it demonstrates Islands' competency as a conventional rock act while dropping the occasional winking reminder that the band hasn't lost their ability to get weird.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Defend Yourself
    Defend Yourself still suggests a creator with an obsessively huge record collection, only the heady variation of explored genres seems more boilerplate, a sense of variety for variety's sake rather than a desire to put a unique stamp on old musical tropes.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Electric Lady
    These two discs capture, in far more disciplined fashion than her debut, the motley delights of this singer and self-styled savant, whose delivery is as impressive and singular as her dance moves.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Dynamics
    They're especially fond of bad movie soundtracks from the '80s, and they show it on their sophomore effort, Dynamics, by making every song sound like the non-hits off those albums.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    AM
    Almost a decade into their career, the Arctic Monkeys have aged gracefully into their precociously world-weary image with a mature album about immaturity, a carefully written and produced effort about the desultory careen of youth.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Privateering
    The pleasure isn't in the gimmick or the dress-up, but in the disciplined play of emotion behind them.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tales of Us
    If Tales of Us has a weakness, it's its tonal consistency.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    On Oni Pond
    Each album in the band's discography has benefitted from a sense of chaos, an always-looming and welcome threat that things could come unhinged at any moment. The uninspired and wearisome On Oni Pond never creates such tension.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smilewound
    The album is easily Múm's most commercial to date.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    It's a tribute to Case's ever-growing strength as a songwriter that she refuses to take the sharp edges off the vicissitudes her songs depict while still acknowledging the humor and occasional beauty of those edges.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love in the Future
    At 16 tracks, the album moves surprisingly fast, with few songs outstaying their welcome, but it ultimately fails to successfully push Legend into the future.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hesitation Marks
    In almost every way, this is the least outré effort NIN has proffered since Pretty Hate Machine. It's focused but inquisitive, as opposed to declarative.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Silver Gymnasium
    Ostensibly about a specific time and place, The Silver Gymnasium confirms Okkervil River as a band that's still too crafty to settle for anything so simple as a straightforward paean to childhood, using this boilerplate structure to examine the deeper meaning behind the natural impulse to fixate on the past.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Repave
    It's an abstract and occasionally disjointed album that ultimately finds a rewarding balance, both sonically and lyrically, between the obscure and the deeply personal.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    6 Feet Beneath the Moon
    6 Feet Beneath the Moon feels incomplete and rushed, with Marshall cramming as many of his ideas as he can into a single album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Versions
    With Versions, Jesus achieves something her previous albums hadn't: She's created art so unobjectionable that it attains a kind of beige obscenity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Slow Focus
    Beyond constructing music marked by a consummate sense of craftsmanship, Fuck Buttons continue to toy with notions of what an album should be, a natural progression for a band whose only defining quality is their refusal to settle on a definitive sound.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Hate Music
    What amazes most, and there's much to marvel at here, is the childlike wonder and sprightly sense of play that still remains after all these years.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action
    Franz Ferdinand's Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action is an unapologetically swaggering disco-rock album that refuses to overstay its welcome.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carrier
    Carrier is a disarming reminder of the therapeutic power music can hold.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Doris
    Earl may be one of the quieter voices on Doris, but his dense, evocative sensibility dominates the album both lyrically and musically, making for exciting confirmation that one of rap's most technically accomplished voices has also got his conceptual vision firmly in place.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Slave Vows
    It is hardcore, a visceral distillation of fury that aims to wound.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Small Murmuration
    Snow Ghosts might take what they're doing a little too seriously, and the album's gothic, macabre undertones can seem silly at times, but it's hard to resist sinking down into the duo's melodramatic doom and gloom.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paracosm
    Paracosm is essentially a travelogue, albeit wrinkled, scuffed, and faded so as to match the love-worn tastes of its creator.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Flourish // Perish
    Braids perform with a self-assured subtlety, lending their sophomore album a quiet, unassuming depth that far outstrips the flash of its predecessor.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Warp & Weft
    Warp & Weft is Veirs's most expansive effort yet, with obvious musical and thematic ties to experimental Americana.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Where You Stand
    Though Where You Stand, their first album in five years, doesn't scale quite the same heights [as 1999's The Man Who]", there's real beauty in it too.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    An Object
    While there are times when the band seems complacent, they still have plenty of sounds left to explore and destroy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pura Vida Conspiracy
    Gogol Bordello's energy and optimism can grow exhausting, and even if their product has begun to feel familiar, they still sound unlike any other band on the planet, and it's hard not to be charmed by the fervor with which they keep seeking out new borders to cross and uninitiated listeners to welcome into their always hospitable tribe.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    In a World Like This
    They seem stuck returning to the same predictable song structures and turgid melodies that made them famous in the first place.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    II
    Just as their unique names have been combined to form a completely fatuous hybrid, Modeselektor and Apparat have almost completely negated each other's strengths.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Civil Wars
    The Civil Wars have gone from blithely conjuring a co-ed version of the Everly Brothers to making a tense, assertive Southern gothic album, complete with religious undertones, images of decaying locales, and tales of troubled relationships.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rhythm & Blues
    Guy's new album, Rhythm & Blues, spills onto two discs, one named "Rhythm" and the other "Blues," and the conceit would work if both halves of the album weren't each encrusted with the same indistinguishable cheese.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jinx
    Jinx starts out promising, with a few well-crafted and consistently surprising gems, but the lackluster backend seems far too content to tread water.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Don't Look Down
    At heart, Don't Look Down is a vaguely hip-hop-inflected homage to '90s pop, not so much uninteresting as underwhelming and repetitive in its orchestration.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blurred Lines
    If slower numbers like the Princely "4 the Rest of My Life" and the Billy Joel-reminiscent piano ballad "The Good Life" are forgettable by comparison, it's because they prosaically articulate the joie de vivre that's already been made abundantly clear in the uptempos. On an album that gets off to such an effervescent start, such blunt pronouncements only serve to kill the vibe.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Stars Dance
    It boasts a harsher, edgier sound than that of her previous efforts; on every other front, it's a lazy, bloated, and occasionally offensive album that lacks any remnant of personality or creativity.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electric
    The Pet Shop Boys have once again given themselves a lease on another era, and Price was obviously the right choice to help them do so.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stills
    Marred by a lack of discipline, but bursting with a deliciously bleak, psychotropic allure, Stills's capricious spirit is ultimately its greatest strength and its most glaring fault.
    • 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.
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