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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    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blessed
    Blessed isn't a happy record in any conventional sense, but it's informed by deeply felt hope and contentment.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Songs From a Zulu Farm
    Its intentions are clearly wholesome, the music is sweet and cordial, and it's impossible to tell whether its ultimate drabness is the group's fault or our own.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Fall
    Given that Albarn recorded the album solely using iPad applications, and that this seems to be a ubiquitous suffix to any discussion of the album, it's difficult not to dismiss The Fall as a gimmicky concept album or even a shameless 45-minute Apple advertisement, but there are just about enough interesting moments here to dispel that cynical view.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lorraine
    While that may be true to McKenna's roots and doesn't pull focus from the songs themselves, it also makes the latter half of Lorraine a drag.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    21
    For most of 21, she's cast as a fortress of old-school soul besieged by lifeless jingles, a force of nature restrained by multiplatinum fetters.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fluorescence
    The musical bliss is short-lived, and the rest of Fluorescence is pretty much the musical equivalent of throwing darts at a wall full of sticky notes while blindfolded and drunk: Some happy accidents, but mostly a forgettable, sloppy mess.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Magic Place
    In the end, The Magic Place is a beautiful, ambiguous diversion better suited as a companion soundtrack to some experimental film or art installation than as the debut for a promising young singer.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Underneath the Pine
    Despite the oversaturated warmth of Beneath the Pine's production, this is a cold record, an archetype of technical mastery and genre-worship prevailing over the artistry of an individual voice. As a result, Bundick often sounds not like one artist, but the amalgamation of a whole movement's worth of ideas and styles, borrowed and rearranged into a faceless, forgettable whole.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The People's Key
    This overflowing sense of self has done more to define Oberst than anything else, and it continues on The People's Key, spilling into the contemporary malaise he invokes and the often brilliant poetic associations of which he's sometimes capable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    White Wilderness
    Although he has always been most highly touted for his expertise as a producer, White Wilderness is the first of Vanderslice's albums to sound like its production, rather than its songs, is the driving force.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    La Sera
    If the album format is really dying, then Goodman's got a good shot at cornering the market of 21st-century Shangri-La candy pop, but she should do it two minutes at a time.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blue Songs
    what's missing is that nagging vocal that hovers somewhere between sublime and corrosive, as so many of the great performances in dance music have.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Go-Go Boots
    Go-Go Boots aims for a soulful, introspective vibe, but it ends up as the dullest album in the Truckers's catalogue.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Tell Me
    Over the course of Tell Me, her second full-length album, Mayfield emerges as a singer-songwriter with a powerful and distinct voice.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Higher Than The Eiffel
    The aforementioned hangovers, though, feel like just that, overly morose and saccharinely slushy numbers that sound labored and fail to give Higher Than the Eiffel the worthwhile breather it needs following those breakneck party numbers.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Violet Cries
    Named after a grim Danish fairy tale, Esben and the Witch pursues a narrow course on their first album, Violet Cries, a morose, pitch-black update of the '80s dark-wave template.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tao of the Dead
    I can't imagine why anyone would want to hear another half-hour of this crap, but if you've got brain cells to spare after Tao of the Dead's wonky, caterwauling sendoff, then by all means, put on your +2 Boots of Moshing and get to it!
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mission Bell
    Mission Bell [is] a pleasant record, but Lee should be aiming for more than just "pleasant" by this point in his career.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rolling Blackouts
    Rolling Blackouts eventually circles around to the type of funky, percussive stuff that the Go! Team does best, though not before detouring through a few instrumentals-typically a mixed bag for the band, and no less so on this album.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Party Ain't Over
    One of White's strengths has always been his ability to separate pastiche from a genuine aesthetic, and The Party Ain't Over is suffocated by its overly stylized, affected '50s put-on.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Party Store
    If the band is innately familiar with the rules of this kind of territory, they sound completely out of their depth in other attempts.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Spiritual Mental Physical
    The band has undeniable horsepower, driven mostly by Dannis's fantastic drumming, and that strength shows itself in a few key moments here, but the collection is unfortunately padded with half an album's worth of inconsequential rehearsal extracts.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Content
    Gang of Four, who came up in the same scene and strove for a similar brand of smart, prickly post-punk, has a little harder time with the transition to modernity on Content, a weirdly anachronistic album that retains some of the band's signature qualities while landing on a strange new sound.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    There Are Rules
    While the style of rock for which they're best known might now be passé, the Get Up Kids pushes themselves entirely too far outside their comfort zone on There Are Rules, resulting in an album that is at turns strident and awkward.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics
    Arcade Dynamics, then, falls somewhere in between the cleaned-up Real Estate sound and the noisier aesthetic of Landscapes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mine Is Yours
    Having set the bar incredibly high with their earlier work, Cold War Kids falls prey to the expectations game; beyond its forgettable mediocrity, Mine Is Yours is also a crushing disappointment.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes
    Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes is throwback after throwback, the album where the roots-rock traditionalism that has always been the counterweight to Ness's punk modernism finally comes crushing down on the whole Social Distortion enterprise.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Steel Magnolia
    As co-writers of seven of the album's 12 songs, Jones and Linsey can be blamed for the weak material.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Outside
    Obviously, Tapes 'n Tapes wouldn't be content as a glorified indie-rock cover band, but what Outside lacks is a sense of what they would want to be instead.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    8701
    Acoustic guitar work, live drums by Stokley of Mint Condition (remember them?), and a cameo by the law-brushing P. Diddy ("If making hits is a crime, I plead guilty") also lend a surprising amount of variety to what could have been an otherwise homogenized set.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Best Night of My Life
    He drops his share of deafening clunkers, poisoning some songs so badly that they become unlistenable. But others, mostly those where he stands back and croons harmlessly in the background, are deliciously chill.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    No Boys Allowed
    Keri is so very...what? It sounds like she's making a move at Chaka-Whitney "every woman" territory, only with a few key differences.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Just Charlie
    It's R&B in the missionary position, a politely seductive soundtrack for obligatory anniversary humping.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Reggie
    Yet for all the patchy unevenness that comes out in places, the album is also a consistently likable effort.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Postelles
    At their best, the Postelles sound recalls Elvis Costello, only poppier and sans drollness; at its worst, it's grown-up pop-punk with a weak handle on irony.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All Day
    All Day is blessed with some of the most dazzling mash-ups ever to infringe copyright, but an overwhelming majority of these emerge during the first 15 minutes, and the hour of music that follows rarely reaches the opening salvo's dizzying heights.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wonders of the Younger
    There are plenty of "real" songs on Wonders of the Younger, and the more simplistic sing-alongs sound boorish and annoying in their company.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Strip Me
    It may not be the year's worst pop album, but Strip Me might just be the most exhausting and heavy-handed.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Love Letter
    Kelly's default mode throughout Love Letter is needy like a Salvation Army bell-ringer.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Farmer's Daughter
    Her debut album, Farmer's Daughter, is consistent with the singer-songwriter's public persona, then, because it finds her attempting to rise above production values that are fundamentally at odds with what she does well.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Michael
    Michael rarely serves up anything that will have its listeners making a b-line for the dance floor.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pink Friday
    It's this seeming lack of confidence, contradictory to the poise she shows elsewhere, which identifies the problems with Pink Friday, an often wobbly first effort that shows enormous promise.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    5.0
    5.0 is never overtly awful, but it definitely sinks into the zone of mediocrity occupied by so many mainstream rap albums, where they sit like dishes moldering beneath dirty water.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cannibal
    Ke$ha doesn't branch out in any significant way here, so it's unlikely to do for her what the similarly packaged The Fame Monster did for Lady Gaga.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tron: Legacy
    It's all too clear Disney wanted the cachet, not the daft nor the punk. Trick yourselves into thinking the robots are twisting some radical new spin on the form if you wish, but I'm logging off now.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Only 1 Flo, Pt. 1
    The fact that he sings many of his own hooks might seem like a useful skill, but the combined blandness of his singing and rapping only increases the overwhelming blandness of Only One Flo, an album that seems insistent on reminding us how dispensable he actually is.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Beginning
    The Beginning, the Black Eyed Peas's sixth and least original album yet, is the sound of the pigs' blood dumped on Carrie White's head congealing into a sticky, hardened scab of forced good times.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    No Mercy
    Mostly, the album shows that T.I.'s lyrical side is not worthy of much attention.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    4 x 4 = 12
    As dedicated, efficient, and resourceful as deadmau5 is, he's ultimately unable to escape the severe limitations of his craft, and therefore can't elevate 4X4=12 beyond standard club fare.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Not Music
    It's an aspect of the band that surely deserves recognition, and Not Music, uneven and understated, is its fitting epitaph.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Other Side of Zero
    "Worn Out Tune" says it all, with its bluesy but not-quite-bleak atmosphere, and Ziman happily embracing "the ones we just can't get enough of." The band wants all their songs to have this quality, but every track on the album sounds like they were labored over so carefully that spontaneity lost every battle against precision.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Earth vs. the Pipettes
    "From Today" and "I Need a Little Time" may have decent enough hooks and propulsive dance beats, but there's simply nothing about Earth vs. the Pipettes that's distinctive or in any way better than what other '80s revivalists have already done.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Loud
    Like Janet's last hit album, Loud is a decided step away from its über-personal, melodrama-drenched predecessor.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Small Craft On A Milk Sea
    The album may lack consistency, but it isn't short on order, each track bearing some indelible marker of Eno's touch.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Merry Christmas II You
    It's an attempted rewind. As such, it's probably one of the most revealing and none-too-flattering approximations of the mindset of a certain sort of adult's Christmas spirit.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sidewalks
    Matt and Kim has lost a bit of their musical soul in attempting to reconcile their rough, campy sound with mass-appeal polish, and as a result, Sidewalks lacks a considerable amount of the bite of its predecessor.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Olympia
    Ferry manages to maintain the balance between strut and elegance without pushing into manic depictions of either form. This doesn't mean everything works so neatly....Guest spots from Eno, David Gilmour, Groove Armada, and Jonny Greenwood disappear entirely into the thick production, which robs them of any distinctive contribution.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Speak Now
    Speak Now is no pop masterpiece, though it's sure to be hailed as such in some circles.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Belle and Sebastian Write About Love
    Adding another disappointment to an already inconsistent catalogue, Write About Love confirms that Belle and Sebastian is the type of band that's fully capable of genius, just not reliably or often.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Union
    That the album is a failure despite the authentic passion behind it only accentuates its participants' respective ruts. And it's further proof that the most consistent musicians are more pilgrims than they are professionals.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jojo Burger Tempest
    Caught somewhere between dream-pop banality one moment and pleasant, expertly crafted distraction the next, this overstuffed album is perhaps not nearly as poor as its title choice would suggest, but it's still in need of some generous paring.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    United Nations of Sound
    In between the record's one marked high point and its half-a-dozen contemptible lows, the former Verve frontman takes the United Nations of Sound to places he's been countless times before.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Come Around Sundown
    Come Around Sundown buys Kings of Leon at least a little more time as the champions of mass-appeal Dixie garage rock.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Funstyle
    Phair has never taken herself even half as seriously as the straight, white, male rock press always has, which goes a long way in explaining why she's disappointed so many since she was branded a rock goddess in the early '90s. And Funstyle, though interesting, is unlikely to change that.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Charleston, SC 1966
    It's hard to imagine that Charleston, SC 1966 won't continue Rucker's hot streak within the country genre, even if the album suggests that he's content to follow the genre's trends rather than set them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Grand Theatre, Vol. 1
    Taken on its own merits, though, Volume One is mostly a success, and it's great to hear the alt-country vets sounding more alternative and more country than they have in years.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am Not a Human Being
    I Am Not a Human Being is kind of a crummy album, rife with laziness and repetition.
    • 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.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tiger Suit
    Tiger Suit fails because it doesn't refine or advance Tunstall's songwriting in any way when compared to her previous efforts.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bubblegum
    Bubblegum may be the sound of growth, but its progress is directed in a strangely traditional direction for a band formerly disinterested in such ordinariness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Doo-Wops and Hooligans
    Doo-Wops & Hooligans kicks up no fuss, and shortchanges on its promise of both doo-wop and hooliganism.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Game of Monogamy
    It's at times shocking how off-key the album actually is. The music switches between dry and histrionic. The lyrics are flat and repetitive.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wreckorder
    Clocking in at a brisk 34 minutes, there isn't enough time for Wreckorder to falter. But on the other hand, Healy can't seem to find the time to amply spread his wings either.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Am the West
    Judging by moments like these, when Cube's performance is allowed to take center stage, I Am the West becomes an engaging hip-hop record.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Record Collection
    Three albums in, it's hard to imagine a Mark Ronson album not brimming over with a crowd-pleasing, inter-genre collection of guest stars.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Invented
    Invented doesn't entirely lose those attributes that make Jimmy Eat World such a doggedly likable band, but it struggles to know what happens when emo kids get over it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pete Yorn
    While that may not necessarily make Yorn any more distinctive on this album than on any of his previous efforts, Black's energy at least gives him more of an edge than the singer-songwriter has been known for in the past.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wake Up!
    Pedantic spoken-word sections heighten the feeling of this-is-good-for-you laboriousness and make Wake Up! come off as heavier than it needs to.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hands All Over
    Hands All Over won't fulfill Levine's ambition to redefine Maroon 5's identity: If anything, it only steers the band further from the potential suggested by their 2002 debut, Songs About Jane.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Penny Sparkle
    For all its dreaminess, Penny Sparkle is clinical and almost always predictable, despite the exotic murmurs of lead singer Kazu Makino.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hurley
    Hurley, named after the tragicomic Lost character (who also adorns the cover), continues this recent trend with no less than nine co-writers (for 10 songs), and an even longer list of featured musicians, including Michael Cera, who is enlisted to lay down some mandolin and harmonies for no discernible reason beyond his being Michael Cera.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Who We Touch
    Who We Touch works best when the band revels in their sense of adventure, but it suffers dramatically when overtly appealing to days gone by.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Flamingo
    Flamingo makes a pretty strong case that Flowers doesn't have the best grasp of what it is he does well.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heretofore
    Heretofore highlights the technical skill and genre-blurring vision that makes Megafaun one of the most captivating acts in Americana. But when their ideas run too far out of bounds, the album also makes it clear that Megafaun hasn't quite figured themselves out yet.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Interpol
    Interpol may not be quite self-parody, but it's also not the sort of thing that's going to make them hip again anytime soon. Not that they would even care.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mean Old Man
    Mean Old Man may be a fundamentally lazy album, but it works in the right places, making sharp choices and offering a mostly agreeable experience.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All Birds Say
    All Birds Say is worn down by its sluggishness and suffers overall from a surfeit of ineffectual good humor.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Strange Weather, Isn't It?
    Simply put, Strange Weather, Isn't It? is beat for the sake of beat. !!! has certainly mastered the means of dance-rock, but they haven't mastered the ends.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sugar
    The band shows range, but there's never a moment where all the elements cohere into something completely unique. Even with more professional-sounding production and songwriting, they still can't escape their influences.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tomorrow Morning
    In stark contrast to its title, Tomorrow Morning is dull, dark, and hopeless.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Surfing the Void
    Yet whereas Myths of the Near Future was often psychotically fun, Surfing the Void finds Klaxons taking their genre rock shtick way too seriously.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Foundling
    Gray tries to bring some color to the album with his terrific, weathered tenor, but there's only so much he can do in performing material this staid.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    31 Minutes To Takeoff
    Posner's B-boy sound may be derivative as hell, but the album stands to turn him into the latest DIY sensation.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    King of the Beach
    A performer like Williams has a lot to lose by releasing what is, by and large, an accessible pop-rock album.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Spot the Difference
    The game at the core of Spot the Difference may be mostly meaningless, but it tricks us into a different kind of comprehension, granting a new face to songs that now no longer seem as stale.
    • 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Indrupendence Day
    While InDRUpendence Day may play at toughness, adhering to today's fashions as completely as the group did to the simpler whims of the '90s, it never postures.
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