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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Something To Tell You
    These 11 slickly produced tracks are kept more uniform in tone and content, to the point of repetition, and the feelings expressed sound more manufactured than genuine.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Out in the Storm
    After a while, Crutchfield's melodies also blend together, especially during the album's middle stretch, where the similar-sounding “Sparks Fly” and “Brass Beam” are sequenced back to back.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Funk Wav Bounces, Vol. 1
    By showing little interest in challenging the clichés of men fixated on conquest and status symbols and women focused on “feels,” Harris undermines what could have been an inspired creative reinvention.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    TLC
    TLC succeeds only to the extent that it captures the sound and style of the group's golden era, but absent of Left Eye's signature swagger; though T-Boz and Chilli are in fine voice, the group's success largely relied on the delicate balance of all three members.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Together At Last
    The album won't ever take a place among the landmarks in Tweedy's catalogue, but it does provide a fresh way to hear and appreciate them.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Woodstock
    Instead of putting their own offbeat stamp on danceable pop music, Portugal. The Man abandons their once-unique sound and retreats into imitation.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Witness
    The album lacks both the big hooks that propelled Perry's past hits up the charts and the conceptual and sonic focus to give her pop real purpose.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Welcome Home
    If the album's greatest sin was simply sonic banality, it would be a lot more palatable. Far worse is the cynical nature of the album's roosty overtures.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    You're Welcome
    There was an inherently intriguing incongruity between his Brian Wilson-inspired melodies and the unfathomable level of DIY grime with which he rendered them on the first couple of (self-recorded) Wavves albums. Absent that tension, Williams's melodies must be judged by their own ingenuity, and on that count, the ones on You're Welcome, especially those in its back half, too often fall short of the mark.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Turn Up the Quiet
    Her [more traditionalist approach] certainly doesn't raise the bar, but it does offer an alluring elegance and low-key appeal.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Humanz
    Humanz falters not when its concept runs thin, but when Albarn and his cavalcade of co-conspirators begin to run out of the meaty hooks that have defined Gorillaz's best work.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Last Rider
    In the end, The Last Rider isn't quite as memorable as Retriever, on which Sexsmith hit his stride as a pop songwriter, or Blue Boy, which boasted a charmingly ragged production courtesy of Steve Earle. But the album has its pleasures.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Memories: Do Not Open
    Uunfortunately, the sound they've settled on is parked firmly in the middle of the road.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Far Field
    Songs about unrequited love will never go out of style, but The Far Field would be better served by occasionally taking the road less traveled.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Automaton
    Musically, Automaton possesses a freewheeling swagger that's energizing and intensely danceable, and Jamiroquai updates their familiar brand of disco and funk into something that feels fresh and progressive. But unfortunately Kay doesn't have anything new to say, as his views on society, technology, and relationships are trapped in a bygone era.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Silver Eye
    Despite collaborations with ambient-drone producer the Haxan Cloak and John Congleton (best known for his work with St. Vincent), musicians Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory have failed to materially push their sound in new direction.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Salutations
    Ultimately, Salutations abandons the potent vulnerability found on the sparer versions of many of these songs, and muddies its tone with the uneven newer ones.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hot Thoughts
    Hot Thoughts is often at its most appealing, though, when it sees Spoon sticking to what they've long proven they know how to do best. That's not universally the case: The album's only straight-ahead garage rocker, the thudding “Shotgun,” is so uncharacteristically regressive and lunkheaded that it might as well be a Kings of Leon song.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Heartworms
    On paper, Mercer's lyrics too often engage in heavy-handed wordplay (“I take the drugs, but the drugs won't take”) or drift off into abstraction (“I dine like an aging pirate”), though the vocals aren't always featured prominently enough to easily decipher on a casual listen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Tourist
    The Tourist is a welcome shift from the amorphous electronica of the band’s last effort, but the haphazard pacing and overreliance on platitudes and generalizations prevent the album from fully achieving the emotional potency aimed for by Ounsworth’s trembling voice.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Temple of I & I
    Too sleek to be real, The Temple of I and I sounds less like Jamaica than the music on the Virgin flight you might hear on the way there.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    4 Your Eyez Only
    4 Your Eyez Only‘s low-key production, favoring muted live-band grooves, occasionally reaches a boil, but mostly it provides scaffolding for Cole to rap. He does the heavy lifting without ever doing anything flashy--or, some might say, anything especially interesting.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Run the Jewels 3
    The level of discourse on Run the Jewels 3 may be higher than your standard hip-hop grandstanding, and the references may be current and the beats may be more intense, but the album remains too entrenched in the grammar of the past to ever feel entirely fresh.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    "Awaken, My Love!"
    A maddening ride with an authenticity problem, Awaken, My Love! finds Glover confusing his idols for muses.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Starboy
    He remains an exceptionally talented vocalist, yet none of the many studio wizards represented in the album's by-committee structure is capable of wrenching him out of his usual morose rhythms. To be fair, none of them really try, playing to his basic talents while also coddling his laziest inclinations, swaddling songs in scintillating soundscapes that coat these sour centers in layers of sweetness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    24K Magic
    The album features the strongest set of beats and rhythmic hooks in Mars's canon to date, making it a could-be heir to gratuitous groove records like 1999, Off the Wall, and Remain in Light--if only it were as innovative. Ultimately, the album's magic is a trick everyone already knows.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jessica Rabbit
    Jessica Rabbit‘s greater emphasis on melody, along with its more diverse, if occasionally too random, structure, clearly comes from savvier musicians who are more aware of their own tendencies and flaws, even if they can’t always overcome them.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Joanne
    Although Joanne lacks the indelible pop hooks that those two influences [Elton John and Prince]--not to mention Gaga herself--are famous for, the album is more sonically consistent and thematically focused than the singer's last solo effort, the regressive Artpop.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    COW / Chill Out, World!
    COW‘s inward-looking is often gray and formless, and suggests that Paterson and Fehlmann are indeed best understood when exploring the concepts they can’t understand.
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