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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    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Starting Over
    The album balances these syrupy moments with a batch of harder-edged tracks that showcase Stapleton’s biting electric guitar riffing but don’t do much to elevate his lyrics. Predictably, he just shifts his focus from love and tenderness to mild hedonism.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cervantine
    Ultimately, for all its globalized interest in mixing world cultures, Cervantine is about noodling, fooling around with different styles via extended jams, which the band at least has the good sense to spice that up with a worldly palette. Yet too often the songs seem drained of any feeling.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Monomania
    Whereas both Deerhunter and Atlas Sound albums typically reflect the obsessive brilliance and meticulous pathos of Cox's personality, there's few signs of either on Monomania, which is in dire need of a little less impulse and a bit more OCD.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Learned The Hard Way
    Even if the album is stagnant from an artistic point of view, Jones and the DAP-Kings really do their damnedest to make it seem fresh.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    So Far Gone [Mixtape]
    For a beginner, even one whose big-time endorsements seem to have cemented a promising start, So Far Gone is a pretty brave effort, and Drake's ability to juggle standard bling-and-bluster narratives with intelligent narratives bodes well for his future.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lost & Found
    At times, it's as if Smith's sheer vocal talent becomes a crutch that restrains her from treading into riskier musical terrain. A large part of the singer's allure derives from her vocal prowess, but she sacrifices invention here, letting the album fizzle out too quietly. Smith is at her best when she reinterprets classic R&B sounds and experiments with the color of her voice.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Obliterati
    The Obliterati is underwhelming not because it's bad, or weak, or mediocre, because it's none of those: it's just not essential.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Goldenheart
    Richard is a talented artist, and her musical palette and tenacious personality remain consistently interesting, but when it comes to conveying emotion, falls back on the same tired tropes that have made many conventional R&B acts feel so exhaustingly familiar.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Rose Has Teeth In The Mouth Of A Beast
    Ultimately, the problem with Beast is that both its concept and its performance are so defined by their academic removes that it's impenetrable.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Am What I Am
    There are some traditional country ballads and some flourishes of Dixieland-style jazz that give character to the album's production, but the overall collection comes across as slight, even fragile.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Metals
    However gorgeous and warm Feist's voice may be, Metals is just too dull for her to overcome.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cavalcade
    It’s an atmosphere-focused album that attempts to express the nastier side of being alive. The result is evocative but not necessarily satisfying.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    July Flame
    With [Jim] James, Veirs has proven that she's capable of breaking out of this pattern. Now she just needs to learn to do it on her own.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ocean to Ocean
    With Ocean to Ocean, it seems as if Amos has all but given up on pushing the limits of her instrument. Which would be more forgivable if the songs themselves didn’t play it quite so safely.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
    The psychiatric exercise of creating the album may have done him some good, but fans of Deerhunter's transcendent rock will have to wait for the band's next album if they want the kind of catharsis that is only hinted at here.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Embryonic
    Embryonic, then, sounds like an over-correction to that trend, pushing the Lips's sound back into more experimental territory.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Name Is My Name
    Like any rapper, Pusha is still heavily dependent on the talent surrounding him, and these connections keep things on an even keel, with mostly strong production work presented throughout.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Deeper Understanding
    The album's lyrics, however, can't match this same level of musical precision, and Granduciel too often repeats the same vague sentiments using threadbare imagery.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sweet Heart Sweet Light
    Throughout Sweet Heart Sweet Light, the lyrics are as thin as the songs are bare, and with lines like "Don't play with fire and you'll never get burned," the band feels dangerously close to becoming a parody of itself.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Manafon
    Its spaces of hollow inaction are far too big, and the concessions it expects of its audience far too large for so little payoff.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Ascension
    While Stevens often reaches great heights on The Ascension, he almost as often seems to get lost in his big ideas.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Murdering Oscar (And Other Love Songs)
    Devoid of the brawn that makes the Truckers so powerful and without a complementary voice off which to bounce, Hood's songs fall into a folksy rut.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    I Liked It Better When You Had No Heart
    The whip-smart hooks and spot-on production on Heart mask Walker's vocal deficiencies, which might otherwise be a more serious liability.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Destroy Rock & Roll
    Simple beats and waves of synthesized strings don't, in themselves, make for neo-disco euphoria.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dye It Blonde
    Dye It Blonde may be a more accomplished production than Smith Westerns, but it's also a roundly enervating creation, drained of the fuzzy promise that defined the band's debut.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Golden Age of Apocalypse
    A little muscle, and maybe even a little heavy-metal menace, would have balanced the album out nicely.
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