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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night
    But even weaker songs are still not a wasted trip, flickering with sharp moments and dazzling effects. In this way, the album asserts itself as a refreshingly pointed piece of chamber pop, a starkly serious work that plays as big but never portentous.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Head First
    As Will Gregory's superimposed sonic backgrounds flit by like the green-screen projections of some fickle, seemingly opportunist sci-fi magician, singer and namesake Alison Goldfrapp's voice--ethereal, otherworldly, but always human--remains a constant variable, the cord that connects all of Goldfrapp's disparate, but equally captivating, incarnations.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pick Of The Litter 1980-2010
    Pick of the Litter really is just a sampling from a catalogue that begs closer examination.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh
    The freeform Return of the Ankh is what it would sound like if 4th World War drank three whole jars of holy water. It doesn't sound one bit like her debut (as early reports indicated), but it does bear the mark of its creator having rolled through the full cipher.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Country Music
    It's the spectacular collection of songs as much as Burnett's ace production and Nelson's first-rate performances that elevates Country Music above the recent spate of country covers records and makes the album an essential addition to Nelson's rich catalogue.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Off On The Pain
    The material explores a broader range of complex and wrenching emotions, and it marks the most consistent set of songs Allan has yet recorded.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Your Future Our Clutter
    They've been relentlessly untypical and consistently awesome, and Your Future might be their best effort of the last decade.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wake Up The Nation
    Wake Up certainly stands as a collection of top-notch material, representing the second part of a late-term renaissance for an artist who already had a reputation as an innovator.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Achin' And Shakin'
    Bundy's music may not always sound like that of country legends like Parton or Loretta Lynn, but she shares with those women a clear understanding of how to create both well-crafted music and an artistic persona over the course of a set of songs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Total Life Forever
    Like its perfectly integrated packaging, Total Life Forever is successful because of attention paid to the things around it, a combination of direct influence and creative rigor that makes for a stirring experience.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Compass
    Compass won't bring Lidell the crossover success he richly deserves, but it is an outstanding document of a restless artist's quest to reinvent his chosen medium. Running in place is for suckers anyway.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    As is, she's turned out a landmark debut that contains a full LP's worth of excellent songs and almost no bad ones, and she's done it entirely on her own highly idiosyncratic terms.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook
    Divine intervention aside, it's a matter of the unparalleled depth of LaVette's interpretive skill that she can take a covers album and make it sound like a collection of originals.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nothing Hurts
    Nothing Hurts is a more honest, more somber take on the current garage wave. There's no sense of silliness or sniggering irony; these songs were written with a heavy heart, and that makes the record a lot more captivating, and a lot easier to invest in.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Crosses
    Against Me!'s roots in punk and newfound interest in arena-rock should make them doubly disposed against any kind of subtlety, which makes it all the more refreshing when White Crosses only occasionally veers into the self-serious terrain for which both genres are known.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revolutions Per Minute
    This is brainy, energizing stuff, and sometimes (such as on "Just Begun," where Kweli trades sharp bars with J. Cole, Jay Electronica, and Mos Def over a beautiful sax loop), it hits like lightning.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Body Talk Pt 1
    Who needs 18 tracks? The shorter format leaves you wanting more, which is the desired effect of the first plate in any three-course meal.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Night Work
    By matching their sound so adriotly to the content of their songs, Scissor Sisters makes Night Work an album of real structural sophistication.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    We Are Born
    While We Are Born may not be as immediate or distinctive a statement as its predecessor, there's ultimately very little about it that doesn't work.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
    Freed from the aesthetic demands of an odd-couple partnership, Big Boi (Antwan Patton) improves on the standard set with 2003's Speakerboxxx, an ostensibly solo work crystallized inside a double-album set, delivering a record that's rigidly focused and almost uniformly strong.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mines
    Mines is thoroughly what one has come to expect from Menomena: an album that is titanic in scope, filled with offbeat wordplay, and entangled instruments.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Antifogmatic
    For all their peerless technical skill, it's the gutsiness they display throughout Antifogmatic that makes the album one of the year's finest, most ambitious records.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Ghost
    No Ghost may initially present itself as one of the prettiest indie-pop albums in recent memory, but its structural depth truly demands and rewards active attention.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Butterfly House
    This is without doubt the band's most mature work to date, and perhaps they're most polished too, thanks to some excellent production work, but Butterfly House still has no respect for convention and shows little interest in becoming a straightforward pop record.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lazers Never Die
    The remixed versions of the songs from Guns Don't Kill People all demonstrate an intuitive understanding of what worked about those songs in their original forms, while the new songs continue in Major Lazer's exploration of the sounds found on nearly every dance floor in the world's tropical climates.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin
    It's the rare, grin-inducing Wilson indulgence that doesn't involve some drug-inspired nonsense about enchanted transistor radios. The entirety of Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin reeks of a newfound arrogance that lifts this Beach Boys aficionado's spirits.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Orchard
    The Orchard is no less sweet or sentimental than its predecessor, but it's a stronger, more complete record.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All We Grow
    Carey almost certainly has a better album in him, but as a 40-minute introduction to the man behind the drumkit, this one is an assured and undemanding success.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Reason Why
    The performances have always been there for Little Big Town; The Reason Why provides just more evidence that there isn't another act in any genre of popular music with greater skill in arranging vocal harmonies. At this point, there's no logical reason that this shouldn't be Little Big Town's long overdue star turn.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reckless
    The incarnation of the SteelDrivers as captured on Reckless has offered one of the year's strongest country records.
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