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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    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    How Do You Sleep at Night?
    The few tolerable moments across How Do You Sleep at Night? come from either outside voices, including a minute-long verse from Fousheé on “Sweet” that outclasses the bulk of Tezzo’s trite observations, or whenever Teezo is shamelessly copying from others, as he does on “Mood Swings” and the Steve Lacey-lite “Familiarity.”
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Album
    While the album’s sheer eclecticism is admirable in theory, each foray stops short of reaching its full potential, leaving listeners stranded in a musical no man’s land of half-baked ideas and missed opportunities.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    - (Subtract)
    No matter how much aesthetic cosplay Sheeran is willing to engage in, though, he’s still pumping out the same cheese-filled anthems that have plagued his previous albums.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Queen of Me
    Ignoring how incohesive Queen of Me’s track list proves to be—the schmaltzy “Last Day of Summer,” for example, is a pedestrian reflection of young love that feels entirely out of place on an album filled with tracks related to embracing one’s present image—the songs themselves are frivolous and lack both sonic character and catchy hooks.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Mansion Musik
    Trippie Redd’s Mansion Musik is repetitive, shoddily produced, and lacks any real structure.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    God Did
    God Did lacks an organized artistic vision, or at least a sense of purpose beyond engaging in purely attention-grabbing theatrics.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Brightest Blue
    For the most part, she doesn’t have the chops or soul of contemporaries like Florence Welch, who sings of similar subject matter with a real torch, and who shares a collaborator in Joseph Kearns, who produced almost every song on Brightest Blue. At Kearns’s behest, the album takes a relatively new tack for Goulding, trading the garish for the palatable, but it’s no less grating as a result.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    No. 6 Collaborations Project
    Too often here, Sheeran feels like a supporting player, especially when he strays from his wheelhouse. For instance, if the singer wants to lean into rapping more, he’s not likely to benefit from doing so on the same track as Chance. And when Sheeran trots out his bad-boy routine, his music feels ersatz. It’s playacting of the worst kind.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Skins
    Many of the album’s nine songs feel unfinished, with only half managing to crack the two-minute mark.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Walls
    Even by the standards of the arena-pop hit-chasers they've become, and not the down-and-dirty guitar band they once were, WALLS is a grating, overly slick disappointment.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stranger Things
    While the juxtaposition of upbeat music and melancholic lyrics has succeeded for artists from the Beatles to David Bowie, here such tactics, amid music that betrays so little originality, render these hackneyed emotional confessions nothing more than indulgent.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Heart Blanche
    Bloated, brainless, and completely lacking in self-awareness, it's a groaning monstrosity of an album, one that can't even put its overwhelming excess to any suitable use.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Kindred
    Unfortunately, Kindred only loses the plot further, entrenching itself in a sonically limited pop vocabulary (starchy synth lines; bristling, reverb-doused percussion; and huge, multi-tracked choruses) that's even further away from the chaotic chemistry of his debut.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Listen
    Not only is none of this fresh, its fast-food vacuity is presented as proud branding.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Get Hurt
    Get Hurt is a shockingly misguided assemblage of over-processed hair-metal guitars, '80s adult-contemporary keyboard swill, and hilariously overblown skullduggery.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Baptized
    It sounds like Daughtry's been listening to a lot of Train and EDM, or at least the band's manager has, because the tempos are a bit peppier than the normal plodding 80bpm post-grunge yawning we're used to, and all of it is slathered with super-slick, edge-sanding modern-pop production, including the surprisingly liberal use of Auto-Tune.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Avril Lavigne
    Avril Lavigne is filled with similar empty life-affirming mantras and boasts of rebelliousness. Lavigne has mined these themes with success in the past, but here the exploration feels forced, as if she's trying to capture an attitude, and craft a persona, that she no longer lives.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    True
    No one demonstrates the artist-as-cash-machine ethos better, as the mechanical churn of commerce rings loudly on each and every track.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Dynamics
    They're especially fond of bad movie soundtracks from the '80s, and they show it on their sophomore effort, Dynamics, by making every song sound like the non-hits off those albums.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Graffiti on the Train
    The whole album seems content to be half-awake, so much so that even the comparably adventurous tracks sound like they can't be bothered to get off the couch.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Versions
    With Versions, Jesus achieves something her previous albums hadn't: She's created art so unobjectionable that it attains a kind of beige obscenity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Stars Dance
    It boasts a harsher, edgier sound than that of her previous efforts; on every other front, it's a lazy, bloated, and occasionally offensive album that lacks any remnant of personality or creativity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Vicissitude
    At every turn, the album serves only to reinforce the fact that Chapman isn't only firmly, almost blindly stuck in the previous decade, but that his music's long-overdue expiration date is the least of its problems.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    You're Always on My Mind
    For an album about "fun under the summer sun," You're Always on My Mind is singularly joyless.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Ready to Die
    While Iggy's feral mischievousness may still be intact, the Stooges no longer feel like a band capable of anything but embarrassing themselves.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    #willpower
    Undoubtedly crafted to be an easy listen, the overstuffed, lumbering, and joyless #willpower is quite the opposite.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Born to Sing: No Plan B
    Fans of the old stuff who long ago wrote Morrison off will find their gripes sadly confirmed on Born to Sing: No Plan B, a recession album that's four years too late.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Strangeland
    Strangeland sounds every bit as dated and overblown as the singles from Cher's "rock" phase.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded
    Tacked on to this mediocre rap album is a ghastly and desperate bid for a hit single that sees Minaj and producer RedOne snatching items from a veritable sale rack of tired Top 40 tricks and tossing them hastily over the most basic synth and drum-machine presets.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Sounds from Nowheresville
    It all amounts to a great deal of bluster for bluster's sake and becomes tiresome almost instantly.
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