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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    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dos!
    While the album is agreeably jejune in a way that recalls the band's Dookie era, only a handful of its tracks are truly essential additions to the Green Day catalogue.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Abbey Road Sessions
    Minogue's early material fares well, if only because any incarnations would be an improvement over the cheesy Stock, Aitken, and Waterman originals, but it's the songs that receive the most drastic revisions that elevate the album above a mere exercise or cash grab.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Free Reign
    Clinic long ago proved themselves capable of startling listeners, surprising them with odd sounds, fast songs, and strange melodies; now they've proven themselves capable of persuading the listener, taking them slowly from relaxation to unease to fear.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lotus
    By virtue of the fact that Lotus is Aguilera's shortest album since her debut, it boasts less filler, but also fewer obvious standouts.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Inner Mansions
    Watered down and indistinct, The Inner Mansions falls into the same trap as Toro y Moi's Underneath the Pine and many other chillwave releases: Namely, that it's essentially a too-familiar collage of Holga-kissed sentimentality, running through its nostalgic musical cues like a mindless carousel slide projector.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sing the Delta
    Sing the Delta... conveys a one-of-a-kind perspective that, somehow, manages to be as unassuming and humble as it is powerful and authoritative.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Music From Another Dimension!
    The album's eight winning cuts would be more than enough for a really good hard-rock disc. Instead we get an album that pays for each of its gems with a nugget of fool's gold.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cee Lo's Magic Moment
    The dark songster offers a bright disc full of pudding-rich arrangements and a number of worthy soul hits--just with a little more twinkly tambourine.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dreams and Nightmares
    The problem is that this pronounced personal narrative frequently buts up against the album's upper-crust trappings.... Still, Dreams and Nightmares delivers a few standout tracks and a ringing confirmation of the rapper's skills.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hands of Glory
    While it's still a triumph of moody, Appalachia-drenched indie pop, Hands of Glory exists as merely a portion of a divided project that should have remained whole.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thankful N' Thoughtful
    Since there's never any faulting LaVette's performances, the quality of her albums depends on both the material and the producers she chooses, and it's in those ways that Thankful N' Thoughtful is a slight letdown from LaVette.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Book Burner
    Book Burner is defiantly hideous and if you love it, you love it for its ugliness or not at all.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    1612 Underture
    1612 Underture is most effective when the curious synth tones play over quips about poky limestone villages and "suppers for the worms and the owls."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Psychedelic Pill
    It's longwinded, taxing, and crunchily dissonant, bereft of even the token acoustic gem-not an album to be tinkered with by anyone who isn't already firmly in the Crazy Horse saddle. For those who are, the album will be something close to a revelation.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Red
    If Red is ultimately too uneven to be a truly great pop album, its highlights are career-best work for Swift, who now sounds like the pop star she was destined to be all along.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Local Business
    [Local Business] is full of tracks that might seem less silly were they more hot-blooded and more akin to the raging storms kicked up on The Monitor and The Airing of Grievances.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Haunted Man
    While the album's comparatively restrained arrangements occasionally wilt in the face of Khan's fierce melodrama, The Haunted Man is still a worthy, often gorgeous entry in the Bat for Lashes canon.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Traveler
    The result isn't exactly Phishy, but it's a merry mishmash, a frothy frolic best appreciated as a sort of senior-spring record.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Former Lives
    What's most frustrating about Former Lives is that for every single shining moment there are two or three that subsequently fall flat.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Two Eleven
    Two Eleven is at its core a singer's album, and it's the clearest portrait yet of Brandy's instrument.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Napalm
    Napalm comes on in old-school fashion, with beats as mere vehicles for lyrics, and lyrics that work on a reassuring number of levels.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Sundark and Riverlight
    The album neither works on its own merits nor captures what's made Wolf one of today's most compelling musical talents. Sundark and Riverlight takes one of the most captivating, progressive catalogues in contemporary pop and makes it sound like a Picnic with the Pops concert.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
    Johnson and the small army of country stars he's enlisted to collaborate on the project all wisely keep the focus on Cochran's extraordinary songwriting, making for an album that highlights the depth and range of Cochran's catalogue and the monumental influence his writing has had on country music.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Department of Disappearance
    It's difficult not to get swept away by, and even admire, the unrelenting sweetness of the songs [for much of the album's first half]. Eventually, though, it becomes equally hard not to gag on the twee preciousness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunken Condos
    It's an album built on monotony that still has a sense of narrative.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pour Une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone
    Pour Une Âme Souveraine both honors Simone's legacy while allowing Ndegeocello to build on her own.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Long Wave
    Love songs and brazen nostalgia are the album's bread and butter, and it's hard not to be drawn in by the comfort of Lynne's layer upon layer of pleasant melodic attention.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unfinished Business
    Earle's decisions are always in service to the individual songs and complement Jackson's dynamic performances without overshadowing them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shut Down The Streets
    For the most part, though, Shut Down the Streets manages to avoid the ennui nipping at its heels, and in its best moments, reinforces Newman as both a skillful wordsmith and a masterful purveyor of Dylan-esque folk rock.
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