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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    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Truth About Love
    Pink thankfully hasn't gone soft, and there are no real clunkers here, but the truth about The Truth About Love is that it's competently, often frustratingly more of the same from an artist who still seems capable of much more.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jinx
    Jinx starts out promising, with a few well-crafted and consistently surprising gems, but the lackluster backend seems far too content to tread water.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tomboy
    While Person Pitch rippled with punctuated sound, Tomboy is a cyclic plateau, a triumph of building algorithms that gradually add plushness and sonic density, but very little movement.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Serpentine Prison
    While Serpentine Prison may invoke familiar accusations of dullness, it’s refreshing to hear Berninger’s disaffected songwriting style take on a more grown-up perspective.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Angels Of Destruction
    Overproduction, unfortunately, doesn't fully account for its flaws. Too many of the songs invoke heavy-handed spiritual imagery.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Postcards From a Young Man
    For all the furious posturing, the message is veneered too neatly with streamlined riffs and swamped too deep in nice-as-pie orchestral melodies. Seething rants seem to pack more of a punch when the product is less polished, and tend to get lost when bookended with excessively opulent trappings. This is rock music, after all.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Freakout/Release
    The band’s tendencies to go through tonal permutations throughout the not-unaptly titled Freakout/Release often feels more disjointed than it does dynamic. Ultimately, neither their desire to create irresistible dance numbers nor their expressions of disenchantment are ever allowed to fully take shape.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Eraser
    If anything, The Eraser more than proves that Yorke, no matter how intriguing or forward-thinking his ideas, needs the democracy of Radiohead to ground his more angular artistic impulses.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ashes & Fire
    Adams's songwriting may be as sharp as ever and better edited than it ever has been, but Ashes & Fire makes some terrific songs sound impossibly bland.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    1,000 Years
    While 1,000 Years isn't a bad album in comparison to other how-the-might-have-fallen spectacles (it's hardly the catastrophe of, say, Liz Phair's Somebody's Miracle), it simply lacks the edge and bite of Tucker's work with Sleater-Kinney.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shrines
    Purity Ring is trying to do too much, and true to the less-is-more adage, the busier Shrines gets, the emptier it feels.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Paper Airplane
    Krauss and Union Station are extraordinary musicians, and it's their impeccable skills that are the main selling point of Paper Airplane.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tin Can Trust
    With its combination of acoustic rock, Spanish music, and mystical balladry, the album traverses all the styles Los Lobos has explored over the last 30 years-with a blues instrumental and a Grateful Dead cover perplexingly thrown in for good measure.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Breakthrough
    Whether or not her risks work, it's taking chances that pays dividends, not placing safe bets.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mount Moriah
    When they keep their songs focused and kick up the tempo a bit, Mount Moriah is far more compelling.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet Her
    With the liveliest songs bookending the album, though, the middle stretch of Planet Her gets swallowed in a celestial soup of midtempo R&B and trap trends like the pitched-down vocals on the narcotic “Been Like This.”
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eyelid Movies
    From the hip-hop loops and grungy, Dust Brothers-style synths of "Running from the Cops," to the new wave balladry of "All Dried Up," and the trip-hop cool of "You Are the Ocean," these are kinds of left-of-center pop tunes that, in the mid-'90s, could have sneaked their way onto Top 40 and modern-rock playlists (which were basically the same thing back then).
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Native Invader
    When Amos eschews her band in favor of barer piano-and-vocal arrangements—as on the contemplative “Breakaway,” the surprisingly reverent “Climb,” and the lush “Mary's Eyes,” a mournful plea to the gods to reverse Amos's mother's aphasia--Native Invader fulfills the promise of its stunning opener.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Eye To The Telescope
    If she doesn't quite justify her place in the company of Antony & The Johnsons' I Am A Bird Now or M.I.A.'s Arular on the short-list for the Mercury Prize, Tunstall certainly holds her own against the likes of [Kelly] Clarkson and [Sheryl] Crow.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Begone Dull Care
    Junior Boys will always be too careful to lapse into something as liquidly hedonistic as, well, Nick Straker Band, but with Begone, they sound like reasonable antecedents.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    (III)
    III is an album of earnest, expansive electronica from a duo few are expecting such sincerity from, and it edges them directly into the middle of the road.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hurry Up, We're Dreaming
    Ultimately Hurry Up, We're Dreaming sounds much more like an M83 wannabe's poor imitation than the real deal.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Here We Rest
    It's on the songs that bring in the R&B influences that made Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit sing that Here We Rest finally showcases what it is that makes Isbell a distinctive talent.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It's A Bit Complicated
    The band's arrangements show a more robust sense of melody than they did on their debut.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Year Zero
    Reznor seems to eschew depth for surface explosions and instant gratification, and the result is a finished product that, while decent on an individual track, doesn't hold up as Year Zero progresses.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Smart Flesh
    Americana and modern folk are often dismissed for their dour self-seriousness, and Smart Flesh, unfortunately, falls into the worst of those trappings.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Higher
    Stapleton knows that his vocals don’t need to be forceful to make an impact, a point driven home on the beautiful closer “Mountains of My Mind,” on which his intimate voice is paired with just an acoustic guitar. But while tracks like that are evidence of Stapleton’s singing and storytelling abilities, more often than not, the songs on Higher struggle to take off.
    • 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.
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