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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    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Friends
    Friends so incessantly refers to its generic seasons-change premise that its emotional impact is wholly blunted by the album’s end.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revolution Radio
    On Revolution Radio, his more personal songs are far more endearing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Head Carrier
    When not vainly trying to live up to their legacy and instead embracing middle-age, the Pixies end up doing a much better job of not tainting said legacy. Head Carrier's best moments are straightforward, midtempo, guitar-based alt-rock.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    All Wet
    Despite the extensive coordination involved in featuring so many notable guests, All Wet too often feels half-baked, with Dupieux stirring up interesting ideas only to tire of them too quickly.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Away
    Despite some conceptual shakiness and a few instances of turgid sentimentality, Sheff is doing fine on his own, continuing to detail unsteady emotional ground with a characteristic mixture of self-assurance and existential dread.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    AIM
    AIM finds M.I.A. content to simply make an album, not craft a definitive statement to punctuate her career.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Amnesty (I)
    The album meets all goth-adjacent indie-dance needs squarely. It doesn't, however, ever transcend those needs.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Callus
    Unfortunately, Gonjasufi's attempt to turn his solidarity with the angry and the dispossessed into a musical concept is too blandly realized to be convincing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Boy King
    By blatantly exposing a core of raw sexuality, previously presented only indirectly in their music, the group ends up removing any possible release valve while stripping the songs of nuance.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    We're All Somebody from Somewhere
    Tyler and his collaborators manage to distill the alleged death of arena rock and its rebirth as modern-day pop country into a 55-minute runtime. Unfortunately, in equal measure, it's also a testament to the depths to which Tyler is willing to superficially pander in order to remain commercially relevant.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Blank Face LP
    Blank Face LP is ultimately an unfocused album, one caught between reportage and repugnant opportunism.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    True Sadness
    While the experiments in modern techniques here vary in effectiveness, they at least spur the band to capture the spontaneity and jubilance of their often rapturous live shows--a spirit that often gets lost when they pack their albums with painfully sincere, stone-faced balladry. In fact, it's when the Avetts lean back on their standard neo-bluegrass style that True Sadness is at its dullest.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mountain Will Fall
    The Mountain Will Fall is just slack, with perfunctory ideas waiting impatiently for guest stars to enliven them through association.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kidsticks
    Most of the songs on Kidsticks are quick and fun, with bright hooks and buoyant keyboards, and the lyrics lack the consequence Orton has brought to the themes of love and loss in the past.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Colour In Anything
    The Colour in Anything, as dazzling as it often is, finds Blake sidetracked by all the things he can do and doing them coldly, rather than focusing on the few things he should.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Thank You
    One or two of these songs might scan as tongue-in-cheek; nearly half an album's worth is a form of caricature, paying lip service to a millennial generation raised on hollow self-affirmations.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Junk
    On a base, per-song level, Junk is a sturdy little workhorse of an album.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stiff
    This is the problem with the album's more ambitious tracks: They confuse rather than clarify the band's identity, and sound more like demos than full-fledged songs. ... Still, White Denim manages to slow the pace and discover its soul more than a few times here, most notably on the winking Al Green sendup “Take It Easy (Ever After Lasting Love).”
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cleopatra
    Ultimately, though, Cleopatra is simply Americana pastiche we've heard a hundred times before.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dame Fortune
    In short, a breezy DJ set attuned for meditative easy listening. When this approach clicks, the results are nothing less than sumptuous, a rich panorama of material organized by an artist whose greatest talents seem to lie in curation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mind of Mine
    The lyrics throughout Mind of Mine are similarly by-the-numbers pop-R&B: pleasure-obsessed, vaguely misogynist, and largely disposable. By the album's midpoint, Malik's playboy shtick starts to outstay its welcome.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Barbara Barbara, We Face a Shining Future
    The album, which at just seven tracks long (and none of them 15-minute monsters on the order of “Juanita”) feels almost like a two-fisted EP.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    You and I
    Whether it was classic rock or the blues, Buckley’s covers were never simply exercises in imitation, always revealing a part of him, but it’s his original material, too little of which is found here, that truly provides a glimpse into his soul.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jesu/Sun Kil Moon
    While taking Kozelek out of his musical comfort zone at times pays off with interesting results on Jesu/Sun Kil Moon, other parts of the album makes one wonder if Kozelek wasn't better off continuing to pick away at his nylon string guitar and ramble away like usual.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    99 Cents
    More often than hitting a sweet spot in between, the songs here are overly busy (like “Big Boss”) or short on ideas (the by-the-numbers “Before the Fire” and the psych-rock “Outside the War”), and the album's title turns into an unfortunate allusion to a warehouse stocked to the brim with cheap toys, none built to last.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anti
    The ultimate impression the album leaves isn't just that of an artist who failed to follow through on her vision, but who never bothered to conceive one in the first place.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This Is Acting
    Sia deserves credit for so easily slipping into the personas of her muses, but “Sweet Design,” which harks back to the go-go sound of Beyoncé's B'Day, and “Move Your Body,” whose unabashed 4/4 beat and clattering EDM percussion are straight out of Rihanna's Loud, seem more like dated outtakes than underappreciated gems.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dystopia
    On the epic title track and vampy “Bullet to the Brain,” the approach yields sturdy tunes. Elsewhere, Dystopia is marred by repetitive phrasing and turgid hooks; the riffs here are high volume, low value.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Catastrophist
    Too often, The Catastrophist leaves its themes in the lurch, spinning its wheels when it should be charging forward.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Alone in the Universe
    The best of these 10 tidy songs are fun and uncannily recognizable, even the first time you hear them, as songs by Lynne. The worst are still uncanny, but less hooky, and earn the biggest insult you can throw at any ELO song: They're colorless.
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