Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,121 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: 1,691 out of 3121
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3121
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3121
3121 music reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gold Dust
    Unfortunately, the remainder of the tracks on Gold Dust simply aren't significantly better or worse than they were in their original forms.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cruel Summer
    Cruel Summer isn't a Kanye album per se, but even as a high-pedigree compilation, it still falls flat.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Uno!
    For all of the expansion in the band's aural palette, it's difficult to escape a sense of déjà vu on some tracks, which sound like only slightly altered versions of previous entries in the Green Day catalogue.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Babel
    While the quartet may be perfectly competent musicians, though, their fundamental conservatism plays against them on Babel, making for an album that's entirely too familiar and safe.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Sound of the Life of the Mind
    There's a pall of maturity over The Sound of the Life of the Mind that both unifies and wrecks it. It rejects, if only halfheartedly, the nerdy, masculine piss that once made the band such guilty fun.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kiss
    Carly Rae Jespen's strengths, which have been roundly declared adequate by the immense popularity of her single "Call Me Maybe," are her simplicity and directness.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Battle Born
    With their simultaneous emphasis on the pedal-to-the-metal triumphalism of rock's yesteryear and their ultimate submission to tomorrow's grinding machinery, the Killers' new album may as well be called Battle Born This Way.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shields
    Pretty but formless, Shields plays like a calculated retreat into something altogether indistinct and inconsequential.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Observator
    While the album may improve on its predecessor, Observator still finds the Raveonettes engaging in far too many self-indulgent habits: They've left Hot Topic, but they don't seem to know where they're headed next.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love This Giant
    A May-November partnership that results in a spate of interesting moments, but largely dies on the vine.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hot House
    At both its best and its worst, the album is essentially inoffensive.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Coexist
    Of the album's few standout tracks, only "Fiction" comes close to eclipsing the half-dozen or so uptempo gems that populated the band's debut. What's left is a collection of richly crafted but idling songs in desperate need of some muscle.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Centipede Hz
    Centipede Hz may have a lot of interesting elements floating around, and it may be held together by the same strong songcraft that has always sustained Animal Collective, but it's all too murky and familiar, less profoundly complex than inaccessibly complicated.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The North
    The North's ultimate undoing isn't that it exudes so much schmaltziness, but that it sounds awkwardly and almost unconsciously dated, similar to the most recent offerings from indie-pop rockers Minus the Bear and Cold War.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mature Themes
    It's another tiring exercise from an artist who may never tire of releasing such proudly hideous messes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Based on a T.R.U. Story
    Overall, there's little to recommend about T.R.U. Story, with the album perhaps best serving as a warning that not everyone can make the transition from pinch hitter to bona-fide star.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Soul Sessions, Vol. 2
    Stone's strict adherence to formula plays against her here, as Vol. 2 feels overly familiar.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Four
    Though Four does contain some sweet spots, it's largely an exercise in throwing projectiles at the proverbial wall with the hopes that something, anything, will stick. Four is a vacant display of miscellany.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Havoc and Bright Lights
    Unfortunately, too many of the songs on Havoc lack that specificity and Morissette's inimitable POV. Her best material has always traded in forces of tension and change, but she spends most of the album sounding like she's leading a meditation.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fragrant World
    The band's tendency to overreach may be muted on Fragrant World, but Yeasayer is still as earnestly silly as ever.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Election Special
    Though Cooder's clearly singing and playing from his bleeding heart on Election Special, the results make one wish that he'd pass both his mic and his guitar back to his brain.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gossamer
    Gossamer is true to its name: colorless and precariously thin, with precious few bright spots.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    MTMTMK
    Decidedly un-fun... Stuffed with manufactured Euro-pop, stale preset beats, Auto-Tuned vocals, and other assorted fallbacks, the album lacks both the harmonic precision and jubilant, vista-inspired mood that defined Mwamwaya's modern rendition of Malawi music on Warm Heart of Africa.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Positive Force
    When Marion makes more creative use of his varied, globe-spanning influences, however, Positive Force is every bit as compelling as its predecessor.... [yet] far too many of the melodic hooks are merely adequate, and he doesn't pull any surprises.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ashes and Roses
    She's been treading water artistically for years now, recording and re-recording slight variations on the same polite, coffeehouse-folk album, and Ashes and Roses is just as lifeless as its predecessor.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Write Me Back
    This-porridge-is-just-right uptempo mush.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Tarnished Gold
    The Tarnished Gold is a consistently lovely, unassuming set. But that same lackadaisical tone plays against Beachwood Sparks: There's nothing on the album that the band hadn't already done a decade ago.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Believe
    Though his new voice has the rambunctiousness that pubescence assumes, it's also marked with the timorousness that's less often celebrated, but equally omnipresent among vocalists trying to figure out the limits of their new range.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Looking 4 Myself
    Unavoidably uneven but fresh.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Our Heads
    Hot Chip is built primarily on good beats and a sweet, devil-may-care sass, neither of which the groups seems interested in delivering on In Our Heads.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Punching Bag
    While Turner has often used his immediately distinctive voice to salvage some middling material, that isn't the case on Punching Bag.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    There's No Leaving Now
    While There's No Leaving Now doesn't accomplish anything new, it never drags down the upbeat timbre of the singer's attractive moodiness.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Synthetica
    For a large chunk of the album, the band seems to assume that Haines's ice-queen snarl somehow lends Synthetica's bland, hookless milieu a cool irreverence, but more often than not, what's supposed to be punk-ish detachment often plays like the group is bored by their own material.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Americana
    In attempting to honor the sounds of the past, Young ends up turning them into toxic sludge.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Stoned Immaculate
    A lazy and undercooked album.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This is PiL
    If lyrically This Is PiL marks a step forward for Lydon, then musically the album seems caught in a mid-'90s production rut, the color and texture of the band's rhythm section feeling leached out.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nashville, Vol. 1: Tear the Woodpile Down
    Genre formalism is all well and good when there's genuine creativity and exploration behind it, but Tear the Woodpile Down exposes the limitations of Stuart's hardline conservatism.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Magic Hour
    A muddled, uneven album that, for a few interminable stretches, sounds like it could've been recorded by just about anyone.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Among the Leaves
    Among the Leaves may not be the most captivating way to spend 70 minutes, but it's a valuable effort nonetheless, a deeply felt record of one man's never-ending struggle with himself.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heroes
    Inconsistency and lack of focus mars Heroes, which relies too heavily on misguided collaborations that don't add anything of value to the album.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Not Your Kind of People
    Not Your Kind of People adheres so doggedly to formula that it often sounds dated... There's no indication that the band has evolved much.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Joyful Noise
    An album that wears its disposability on its sleeve.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Only Place
    The band sounds like they're struggling to come up with a new template, a feeling that leaves The Only Place sounding shiftless and adrift.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bloom
    An anthology of pretty but aimless ambient rock, and a starkly disappointing regression after the thoughtfulness of 2010's Teen Dream.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dr. Dee
    Dr Dee indicates both Albarn's continuing interest in experimentation and his resolute songwriting skills, but doesn't always make for the easiest listen.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Different Ship
    With A Different Ship, Here We Go Magic has essentially removed the "psych" from psych-folk and replaced it with monotony.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blown Away
    Although the album is still a far cry from being great on its own merits or from being a fully realized, well-calibrated statement of artistic identity, it's nonetheless a welcome surprise to hear Underwood finally making some substantive headway toward recording music that aspires to be more than merely pleasant and safe.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Kind of World
    A strangely rockist album that ignores the importance of hooks and melodies and then makes the mistake of equating lo-fi production with seriousness.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Night the Sun Came Up
    The Night the Sun Came Up fails to back up her claim that she's more than just a Ke$ha clone.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In the Time of Gods
    What In the Time of Gods lacks, then, is a balance between the headier material and the wit and frivolity that have made Williams such a distinctive voice in contemporary folk.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Dross Glop
    Unfortunately, the majority of Dross Glop's remixers fail to find any new inspiration in reworking the original material. The results are scattershot, meandering, awkward, and often boring.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    New Life
    With 11 different producers credited on just 10 songs, it's no surprise that New Life is so scattered and uneven, but the album still sounds shockingly cheap.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Boys & Girls
    Boys & Girls is a fine album, full of sturdy Southern-fried blues performed with swagger and verve. As the proper debut for a band that's built its reputation on the fearless pandemonium of its live shows, however, Boys & Girls is curiously and deliberately subdued.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Love You, It's Cool
    With its bright spots marred by detachment, despondency, and meandering, I Love You, It's Cool fails to deliver on the promise of Beast Rest Forth Mouth, knocking Bear in Heaven back a tier or two in the race for indie electro-pop supremacy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    awE naturalE
    THEESatisfaction can't be accused of not bringing themselves, but it's a shame to imagine the album awE naturalE could've been if they'd just brought more.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Happy to You
    As it turns out, beneath all the shattering percussion, well-timed sound crashes, and plethora of borrowed ideas, Happy to You is rather skeletal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rocket Juice & the Moon
    Rocket Juice & the Moon is a sincere and charming homage to Afrobeat, one that provides a glut of alluring moments, if a shortage of truly memorable ones.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Radio Music Society
    She's the kind of artist whose skills absolutely merit a wide audience, but Radio Music Society proves that she hasn't quite figured out how to capture one.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Silent Hour/Golden Mile [EP]
    No matter how sublime Rossen's voice may be, Silent Hour/Golden Mile simply can't transcend the limitations of its origin as a collection of incomplete Grizzly Bear B-sides.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nothing's Gonna Change the Way You Feel About Me Now
    Only a handful of isolated moments convey the same attention to songcraft and the clear perspective that have made Earle's previous albums so captivating.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anarchy, My Dear
    The biggest problem with "Admit It Again," and Anarchy, My Dear as a whole, is that its smart-ass barbs aren't aimed with the kind of precision that separates biting wit from regular old meanness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    And Never Ending Nights
    It's true that some of the tracks on And Never Ending Nights come across as process-oriented and unfinished, which makes sense when you consider them as exercises in Willner's attempt to develop a different aesthetic vocabulary than the one he's already proven fluent in.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wrecking Ball
    Written from the perspective of a demolished stadium, it's broad and disappointingly simple, wallowing in cheap nostalgia and chummy good feelings.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love at the Bottom of the Sea
    There's still a feeling of something missing here, and while the material is much stronger than on the band's most recent releases, there's also a sense that these are the first 15 songs Merritt wrote for the project and not the best of a larger selection.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Leaving Eden
    The result is an album full of gateway music, lovingly made knockoffs that point to the purer and smarter bluegrass it's imitating.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?
    If her execution is sometimes lacking, though, the intensity of O'Connor's emotions when confronting the difficult issues in these songs is never in doubt.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Young & Old
    The problem is, even at their best, Tennis's music seems inconsequential and frankly, neutered.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Sleep & a Forgetting
    This is mildly composed, generally genial pop, with a few good hooks and ideas scattered throughout.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Emotional Traffic
    Emotional Traffic only works in its moments of restraint and relative good taste, and those are exceedingly rare.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Old Ideas
    The voices that accompany him here are by turns syrupy and overwrought, and they work less to melt the icy tenor of the singer's voice than to soften the tracks into complete mush.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Strange Weekend
    These subtle, sublime moments are few and far between as the songs on Strange Weekend start to slope downward and into a blur of mediocrity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Live from the Kitchen
    As with so many of the tracks on Live from the Kitchen, the material isn't good, and Yo Gotti doesn't strain himself trying to save it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Which Side Are You On?
    DiFranco's sincerity is never in question, but on Which Side Are You On?, the candor simply serves her better on her intimate, personal songs than on a set of political songs that are uncharacteristically dated.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Future This
    The fumbling effort to harmonize their irreverence and earnestness leaves the Big Pink ultimately stranded, and the result is a hook-deficient album that wears on the ears after only a few listens.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    TM:103 Hustlerz Ambition
    Unfortunately, he sounds far less in command on most of TM:103, never lost, but rarely entirely at home.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    We Bought a Zoo [Original Soundtrack]
    We Bought a Zoo might just hook newcomers who are intrigued by what they hear.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Love After War
    Though his feathery coos and whispers have long been his calling card, Thicke spends most of Love After War singing in full voice, with mixed results.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    rEvolver
    Throughout rEVOLVEr, T-Pain struggles to sound up to date, but the only way he achieves this is through a depressing obsession with brand consciousness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lioness: Hidden Treasures
    "Lioness" adds nothing of substance to the Winehouse narrative, nor do its individual tracks showcase the best of her writing or singing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Biasonic Hotsauce: Birth of the Nanocloud
    Biasonic Hotsauce peaks far too early.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Born This Way: The Remix
    It's best enjoyed on its own flawed, bombastic terms.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    King Krule [EP]
    He's made a few patient, deliberate expansions of his sonic world and rewarded fans for their interest by letting them flip through his sketchbook.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Talk That Talk
    Talk That Talk is pretty easily the worst Rihanna album yet.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1)
    Is the album a worthy successor to My Life? Not remotely, despite being a listenable chapter in Blige's ongoing Remembrance of Joints Past.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Singing Mailman Delivers
    With a stable of effective songs and a healthy dose of good humor, The Singing Mailman Delivers remains a likable, if not terribly compelling, effort.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nightlife
    However unfairly, the rest of Nightlife doesn't quite meet those lofty heights [of "Don't Move"].
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Camp
    The overall result is a messy jumble that, in its inability to find a consistent tone, ends up in a place that hasn't really been explored before.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It's All Good
    It's All Fine Enough, I Guess would've been a far more honest and accurate title.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Attention Deficit Domination
    The album never sounds like the work of a proper band, since there's no actual interplay between any of the instrumental performances.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Someone To Watch over Me
    Boyle has proven herself capable of doing one thing and one thing only, and Someone to Watch Over Me simply doesn't change that.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Inni [Live]
    Inni is beautiful and alluring, yes, but ultimately a recycled bit of nostalgia likely to please very few.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ambition
    Lloyd's chorus on "Sabotage" is easily the most immediately engaging portion of the album (it's actually quite a lot better than most of the material on his own overpraised King of Hearts), but the brunt of Ambition is as forgettable as big-budget rap gets.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Clancy's Tavern
    Keith has always been predominantly a singles artist, but Clancy's Tavern has a surprisingly high percentage of songs that play as afterthoughts.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mylo Xyloto
    While the melodies on Mylo Xyloto are some of the strongest and most memorable in the band's catalogue, it's the shortcomings in their lyrics that keep Coldplay from packing the kind of emotional wallop their sound really demands.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Enemy/Lover
    Given a wider range of material to show off the group's considerable strengths (Jones is a powerful and expressive vocalist, and the band's control of texture and ambience is exquisite), Dreamers of the Ghetto could have produced a much more compelling debut.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fastlife
    Jonas certainly can't match someone like Timberlake in terms of a defined aesthetic or presence, but at least he and his team had the smarts to enlist producers who know how to construct solid pop songs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Revelation Road
    Ultimately, Revelation Road needed more of that passion and range.
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