Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,113 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: 1,683 out of 3113
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3113
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3113
3113 music reviews
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    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silence Is Loud
    Silence Is Loud tells a fairly coherent story, of a person trying to salvage a relationship but weighing skepticism about how worthy it is of being saved. Archives, though, is ultimately unable to wring enough pathos from the narrative she presents. She’s a skilled designer of breathless jungle soundscapes, stocked with immersive details like aquatic synths, endless breakbeats, and jagged basslines, but she hasn’t fully mastered the autobiographical soul-pop mode.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Exotic Birds Of Prey
    At just seven tracks, the album proves to be paradoxically sparse in its loose, leisurely construction but dense in its intense inscrutability. Exotic Birds of Prey’s resistance to form, accessibility, and interpretation will either draw you in or push you away—and that’s probably the point.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A La Sala
    Apart from a few key songs that continue down the lyrical path charted on Mordechai, A La Sala is largely a retread of Khruangbin’s idiosyncratic brand of dubby psychedelia.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ohio Players
    What’s frustrating is that Ohio Players boasts some great hooks beneath the mire.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Real Power
    Real Power stands as a testament to the Gossip’s unyielding dedication to their signature style. Admittedly, reminding fans and critics that the band helped pioneer pop-punk disco isn’t an unsmart way to stage a comeback. But for anyone hoping that the Gossip might have evolved in the years since 2012’s A Joyful Noise, Real Power is likely to be a real letdown.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everything I Thought It Was
    With an abundance of material, one could never fault Everything I Thought I Was for being too conservative, but it’s an all too clear case of quantity over quality, resulting in quickly diminishing returns.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This is Me…Now
    To imbue that previous album with a timeless R&B quality, Lopez sought out veteran knob-twirler Bruce Swedien, who engineered and mixed classics like Michael Jackson’s Thriller. This Is Me…Now attempts to replicate that sound—and “Mad In Love” and “Not. Going. Anywhere.” both come close—but most of the album falls short of that lofty bar.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Coming Home
    For every few colorless duds defined by their embrace of contemporary R&B, such as the overly smooth “Kissing Strangers” or the brassy “Big,” there’s a creative cut or two, like the suave “Margiela.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    People Who Aren't There Anymore
    As on past albums like 2017’s The Far Field, the quieter passages here are projected with too much force to either serve as a contrast to the songs’ more bombastic sections or fully convey the import of the lyrics. This grows especially tiring on tracks like “The Fight” and “Corner of My Eye,” which are synth-pop equivalents of stadium power ballads. Were the music itself able to match the downbeat undertones of Herring’s words, it might pack a bigger punch.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Saviors
    These songs may diverge from the ones that made Green Day a household name, but three decades later, they continue to strike a balance between teen spirit and maturity.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pink Friday 2
    Despite some catchy moments, there’s almost nothing about Pink Friday 2 that makes it stand out from the current slate of pop and rap music. Unlike its predecessor, the album doesn’t leave much of an impression, and certainly won’t reshape the hip-hop landscape.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Welcome 2 Collegrove
    In the end, this is a dramatically uneven project that demonstrates its creators’ unwillingness to grow up and, more damningly, their inability to conceive of a concept and see it through.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    THE FIRST TIME
    The First Time features some of his weakest hooks to date and a slew of songs that are so unsatisfyingly short so as to feel half-finished.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    i/o
    While the “Bright Side” mixes bring out the album’s more dynamic range, the lyrics lack the edge of Gabriel’s early music. The earnest perspectives of songs like “Love Can Heal” and “Live and Let Live” are apparent right from their titles, with the latter in particular succumbing to cliché. And the more subdued “Dark Side” mixes only highlight those flaws. i/o is heartfelt and meticulously crafted, but its impact is muted by its splintered presentation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Quaranta
    Quaranta makes for an often frustrating experience, where tracks will circle around a topic with some level of pathos but seem incapable of ever reaching their full potential.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Higher
    Stapleton knows that his vocals don’t need to be forceful to make an impact, a point driven home on the beautiful closer “Mountains of My Mind,” on which his intimate voice is paired with just an acoustic guitar. But while tracks like that are evidence of Stapleton’s singing and storytelling abilities, more often than not, the songs on Higher struggle to take off.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zig
    Aside from the disco-fied “Motorbike,” inspired by Jack Cardiff’s 1968 drama The Girl on a Motorcycle, most of Zig takes few such risks. As a result, Poppy has become what she’s successfully evaded up to this point: predictable.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Robed in Rareness [EP]
    Despite the fact that Robed in Rareness runs about the length of an episode of your average sitcom, its songs are so vaporous that one may have a difficult time remembering them. Put bluntly, the album underscores just how much Shabazz Palaces is running on fumes.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    One More Time...
    It doesn’t exactly reinvent the pop-punk wheel—it also could’ve stood to lose about half a dozen songs—but its brightest, most exhilarating spots are a welcome reminder of what made the trio so iconic in the first place.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    For All The Dogs
    But for the most part, For All the Dogs lives up to its title. In short: woof.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Isn't It Now?
    The breathtakingly gorgeous “Stride Rite” is about as pensive as Animal Collective has ever been. Composed of a myriad of cascading piano chords, the song amounts to an eerie, ethereal experience about the many heartbreaks that come with maturation, one expressed with a level of clarity that’s sorely lacking from the rest of Isn’t It Now?
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scarlet
    Doja’s patently irreverent musings on these topics are diverting and humorous, but they’re not served by being presented in such self-serious stylistic trappings. As a result, the album winds up being an uneven grab bag of tracks that aspire to high-brow West Coast rap and down-the-middle pop—the work of a talented MC in search of the right tonal balance.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cottonwood 2
    “Thug It Out” and “Pretty Brown Eyes” find the wunderkind tempering his energy, modulating his tone without flattening it. Would that he applied that approach to the album’s sprawl and structure too.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sorry I Haven't Called
    Here [on “Can I Talk My Shit”] and on “You Know How,” her vocals feel devoid of any distinctive characteristics and are needlessly Auto-Tuned. .... Fortunately, the album’s second half—its sterling middle section in particular, from “Autobahn” through “Don’t Know How”—is vastly more rewarding. These tracks don’t strain as hard to fit into contemporary Spotify playlist formulas and allow Tamko to get back to the more the intimate, sophisticated sound of 2019’s Vagabon.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Perfect Saviors
    The 12 tracks here—which veer from pretty hooks and acoustic guitar to blast beats—linger in an in-between space that doesn’t fully embrace either noise or pop.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mommy
    The scuzzy guitars, driving rhythms, and yelled vocals are all here, but Mommy fails to recapture the lightning in a bottle that made their initial run so magnetic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Austin
    Yes, Malone is still able to whip out some sticky refrains, but the songs here all follow the same overly simplistic pop structure, to the point that their catchiness is less an affirmation of his songwriting talents and more of an inevitability of pop formula.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Euphoric
    The album’s second half leans too heavily on slow, subdued songs, and Georgia’s ostensibly personal lyrics rarely speak in anything but the most general terms. So while singles like “Give It Up for Love” and the title track make for rousing enough dance-pop, It’s Euphoric never quite rises to the promise of its title.
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