Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,119 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: 1,689 out of 3119
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3119
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3119
3119 music reviews
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    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dreamland
    Dreamland’s best moments are propelled by slick drum machines and Bayley’s confidence as a frontman. His turn inward isn’t without humor and insight, but writing about other people on past albums provided a more enveloping experience, fleshing out imagined places and people with an intrigue that’s missing here.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon
    On the whole, in broadening his music’s scope, those responsible for piecing together Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon have lost sight of the local specificity, quirky charisma, and energy that made a name for Pop Smoke in the first place.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet's Mad
    While it’s culled from a mélange of styles and influences, Planet’s Mad manages to stand on its own for its sonic depth and detail. And even if the album’s themes aren’t fully articulated, Baauer’s use of bass, constantly elongating and amplifying, succeeds to evoking a sense of doom.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chromatica
    Whether muddling the creation of the universe with both love and fame (“Sine from Above”) or teasing the theory of the world as a simulation (“Enigma”), these songs only scratch the surface of deeper ideas before falling back on the most basic of pop clichés.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sings Elvis
    At this point in his own career, Danzig may still be able to approximate Elvis’s vocal range, but he fails to invest these songs with a unique vision.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Southside
    There are worse purveyors of bro-country spiced up with hip-hop (here’s looking at you, Florida Georgia Line), and Hunt has an ear for melody, but his reliance on lyrical clichés and hit-you-over-the-head genre fusion makes Southside worth little more than a shrug.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gigaton
    Pearl Jam has been locked in cruise control since the late ‘90s, and their latest, Gigaton, is largely more of the same.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Changes
    There’s a weightlessness to it that seems to signify the slipping of a long-held burden from Bieber’s shoulders. His most personal offering to date, the album feels like a reflection of actual experience as opposed to a projection of a fantasy.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rare
    Rare continually teases intriguing forays into leftfield pop, but so many of the album’s experiments come off as just that, without ever crystallizing with memorable hooks.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hyperspace
    Beck’s 2006 album The Information is a better example of his unrivaled funhouse approach to style and tone: By blending techno, folk, punk, hip-hop, Krautrock, blues, ambient, and groove-oriented rock, that album is by turns strange, aggressive, hilarious, disturbing, eerie, and fun, all while expressing wry dismay over our current cyber-Armageddon. In comparison, and for all its apparent now-ness, Hyperspace feels inconsequential and incomplete.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Courage
    In terms of both its length and themes, the 20-track Courage can feel exhausting, alternating between platitudes about grief and self-empowerment that, with only a few exceptions, make what should feel cathartic sound empty and even anonymous.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wildcard
    While the latter half of Wildcard constitutes a bit of a shuffled deck of genres, there’s enough of a kick to the album as a whole to warrant its title, and Lambert certainly has the chops to sell it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jesus Is King
    There are flashes of genius throughout, moments that insinuate where Kanye could go next with his music. In a sense, the album’s modest pleasures play to its (intended) message, which is supposed to be one of human fallibility and the prospect of improving oneself. But Kanye is eventually going to have to confront the serious limitations that his faith is putting on the range of his art’s expression.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sexorcism
    Disappointingly one-note.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Leaving Meaning.
    Leaving Meaning is a piece of blood-spattered Americana, a haunted-house version of the fabled American dream. But while Gira is a clever musician, that doesn’t make the world he’s created here a pleasant one to visit.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colorado
    Its highs—vintage Crazy Horse guitar workouts, a small handful of charmingly intimate ballads—are intermittently marred by the same sort of problems that have characterized Young’s recent solo work. This includes particularly tuneless vocals and a tendency toward clunky, Facebook uncle-level environmentalist and political ranting.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    DSVII
    DSVII is an undeniably florid soundscape of ‘80s pop culture touchstones. But hearing Gonzalez flesh these castoffs out into full songs through the lens of video game music feels like little more than an amusing experiment.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fear Inoculum
    Sadly, there’s nothing on Fear Inoculum as immediately accessible or anthemic as past Tool glories like “Sober” or “The Pot,” but what is here will reward repeated spins, even if listeners initially find themselves waiting for those mammoth riffs to show up, a la “7empest,” or for Maynard to finally kick into high gear, as in the rousing refrain of “Descending.”
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beneath the Eyrie
    Too often, Beneath the Eyrie sounds like other artists, which is especially disappointing for a group like the Pixies, who have always been more trendsetters than followers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Center Won't Hold
    The Center Won’t Hold clocks in at just over a 30 minutes and lacks a certain spark—a song with the barn-burning intensity of “Entertain” or the heartrending emotion of “One More Hour.” In many places, these songs feel derivative in a way that the band’s music never has before.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Para Mi
    Though the better part of Para Mi was ostensibly written with romantic interests in mind, the songs, so anchored to fixed experiences, have come to represent universal lessons learned. They’re still rough around the edges—many lack dynamism, fading in and out of monochrome synth passages—but the impression that Cuco put all of himself into the music remains.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Fever Dream
    The fireside warmth that made songs like “Dirty Paws” and “Human” feel so intimate has dissipated in favor of squeaky-clean production, leaving the album feeling generic and non-specific.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    An Obelisk
    With so many flat, unoriginal riffs and unmemorable choruses, there’s just not enough meat here to reward that approach, and despite its unrelenting volume, An Obelisk just feels empty without the wide-ranging dynamics and ambitious arrangements that have, until now, defined Titus Andronicus’s music.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fishing for Fishies
    Certainly, the shift from the humanity and warmth of blues-rock to the synthetic robotics of electronic music is intentional, but the album ends too abruptly for one to clearly discern the full extent of its significance.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hurts 2B Human
    Pink’s eighth album, Hurts 2B Human, finds the singer peddling the same boilerplate pop-rock songs about self-empowerment and existential angst that have defined her career for almost 20 years.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    King's Mouth: Music and Songs
    Unfortunately, the album only contains about an EP’s worth of solid material, with the rest of the running time devoted to a tedious children’s fairytale. ... [But the full] songs sound like the basis of a proper follow-up to Yoshimi even more than the zany At War with the Mystics, did.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Free Spirit
    For a burgeoning artist still establishing his signature style, Khalid settles into a surprising complacency here, failing to experiment with the template of his debut.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)
    This album lacks the stitched-together quality of FLOTUS, that certain emphasis on atmosphere, texture, and the unexpected, rather than structure and melody, that makes that album alternately impenetrable and transcendent.
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