Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,122 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: 1,692 out of 3122
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3122
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3122
3122 music reviews
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    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Clear Lake Forest [EP]
    The previous six songs sounded like they were made by a group of guys who'd spent years absorbing the rock music of the '60s deeply into their bones. "Linda's Gone" feels like it was made for stoned 16 year olds who just discovered The Velvet Underground & Nico for the first time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Voyager
    Too many songs here feel slackly constructed, and the overall musical mood only rarely connects with its lyrical content, leaving The Voyager as a moderately successful testimonial effort.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Trouble in Paradise
    When Trouble in Paradise loses its way, it's because Jackson has traded in her frigid allure and commanding bellicosity for frailty and soft-heartedness, sentiments she doesn't deliver with any sort of sincerity.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Yes!
    Unfortunately, his wide-lens worldview leaves Yes! feeling like the musical equivalent of a G-rated sitcom.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hard Believer
    Without enough concrete musical or lyrical details to anchor the album's songs, they occasionally become too abstract for their own good.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Trigga
    Trigga is otherwise designed like a Hollywood blockbuster: squandered talent, obvious themes, and fleeting moments of creative excellence that stick among the clichés.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Glitter
    While the album may have its flaws, it is for the most part a successful period piece that clearly displays Carey's appreciation for all that has come before her.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paula
    Robin Thicke texts his estranged wife, Paula Patton, in the music video for the pointedly titled "Get Her Back," the lead single from said album, Paula. "I don't care," she replies. And it's likely no one else will either.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Animal Ambition: An Untamed Desire to Win
    While simple pleasures are about all Animal Ambition can offer, it at least presents them with listenable panache.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A.K.A.
    The album features more guest rappers than even her 2002 remix album, and the standout "Acting Like That," featuring the always reliable Iggy Azalea, is handily the hardest beat she's ever bought. Unfortunately, A.K.A. also includes a slew of midtempo ballads whose soaring hooks and slick production are wasted on Lopez's reedy voice.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Do It Again
    Röyksopp and Robyn share so much sonic DNA that their team-up is almost self-defeating, blurring the distinction between the two to the point where their respective quirks are essentially scratched in favor of a cohesive but far too clinical production.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Me. I Am Mariah... The Elusive Chanteuse
    Undisciplined R&B pastiches, however, the album has in spades, especially ones that hearken back to her own career.... With surprising internal logic, the album's two unabashedly uptempo ditties are also the forums for Mariah's most serious-minded performances.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Long Way To the Beginning
    A Long Way to the Beginning thus finds the young upstart at a crossroads, between overt legacy mining and striking out on his own, a tentatively successful effort that at least demonstrates Seun's innate skills as a bandleader and a radical.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Upside Down Mountain
    It's a testament to Oberst's enduring versatility that Upside Down Mountain can accommodate the antic creepiness of "Governor's Ball" as well as the transcendent uplift of "Time Forgot," but the album's moments of sentimentality make Oberst sound like just another chart-climbing purveyor of feel-good folky schlock.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Unrepentant Geraldines
    If Unrepentant Geraldines is indeed visual art, it's more of a polite Norman Rockwell than a vomit-stained Sherman. The former goes great with dinner, but I await the gastric upset of the latter.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Xscape
    In the end, Xscape justifies its existence with a handful of potential singles that stand up to Jacko's peerless oeuvre, all of them about love's delirious power.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shine On
    On "Surrender and Certainty" and "Song for My Father," which is surprisingly less saccharine than you might expect, it at least starts to feel like she's evolving as an artist. But those moments are few and far between on an album that feels longer than it is, which, I guess, is a desirable quality for what is basically glorified background music.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everyday Robots
    There's nothing inherently wrong with bemoaning cultural change (it's a better thematic analogue for personal detachment than the isolation of being rich and famous, at least), but Everyday Robots employs a scolding tone that doesn't help sugarcoat its cranky message.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Food
    This is some of Kelis's subtlest, most organic-sounding work. If only there was more of her in it.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The New Classic
    The New Classic mistakenly tries to frame Azalea as hip-hop's newest can't-miss egomaniac, focusing on the riches instead of the far more interesting rags.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Caves
    Her guitar playing, formerly at the top of the mix, gets manipulated and diminished; too often Caves finds the small-voiced singer dwarfed by her own overwhelming backdrops. Of the different varieties of sophomore slumphood, this at least falls into the more interesting category.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett
    Cautionary Tales is underwhelming, but it's also a victim of context.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hendra
    Hendra is such an impressively executed time capsule that it contains not only all of the pleasantries of the genre, but also its excessive earnestness.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Future's Void
    What's most disappointing of all about The Future's Void is that, for all its heady ideas and pretty moments, in almost all ways it's a regression from Anderson's earlier work, a mishmash of half-completed thoughts that fails to ever fully connect.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Supermodel
    Had Supermodel ended with this potent one-two punch, one might be inclined to view the rest more charitably. Sadly, it finishes with two bits of acoustic muzak ("Fire Escape" and "Goats in Trees") and a bid to beat Imagine Dragons at its own game with the kind of frantic Meatloaf-goes-electronica favored in YA-movie soundtracks.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Soul of All Natural Things
    The album would have benefited from playing on that edge; instead, it rests on the laurels of its earthy prettiness.
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