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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Horehound
    Her voice simply doesn't have the heft to project the necessary menace. Despite these occasional missteps, though, Horehound establishes the Dead Weather as a fully-realized band with a sufficiently distinctive point of view that deserves serious consideration as more than just a one-off side project.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Travelling Like The Light
    Brown brings that same sense of fearlessness to her vocal performances. With her slightly raspy timbre, Brown makes for a terrific, swaggering frontwoman....What gets Brown into some trouble is that she often lands on the wrong side of the line that separates homage from rip-off.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The King of Limbs
    The King of Limbs finds Yorke and company preparing to forge a new path while taking a pensive look at what has gone before.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nick Jonas
    With a mix of urban-leaning tracks and more radio-ready Top 40 fare, the album shrewdly distances Jonas from his former band's straightforward pop-rock.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How To Walk Away
    With her most polished, accessible production since 2000's slept-on "Beautiful Creature" and her ear for a memorable pop melody evident for the first time in years, Walk Away even stands to appeal to an audience beyond Hatfield's devoted cult following.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Golden
    While country signifiers abound, from foot-stomping to fiddling, the songs on Golden also smartly juxtapose contemporary pop elements like soaring synth hooks and pitched-up vocals.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    If Lemonade feels less ambitious than the near-70-minute Beyoncé, it's probably because the penetrating spoken-word interludes, composed of verses by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, featured in Lemonade's accompanying long-form music video have been excised from the album itself.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Excitement of Maybe
    With terrific work from drummer Brady Blade and bassist Christian McBride, the record emphasizes rhythm in a way that's uncommon for the generally stuffy Americana scene. And The Excitement of Maybe works because Cervenka, like a true punk, deliberately defies conventions.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Making a New World
    An ambitious concept album about the aftermath of World War I. Even if you don’t feel the need to follow along with their historical lyrics, these 19 short songs are an entertaining, unpredictable listen.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Out Of The Woods
    Out Of The Woods... manages to seamlessly transition between understated chamber-pop ballads reminiscent of Annie Lennox and more hip, club-friendly fare.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    So You Wannabe an Outlaw
    You can call it a return to his roots if you like, but really, So You Wanna Be an Outlaw is just a very good Steve Earle album--one that engages his past without ever sounding stuck in a rut.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ganging Up On The Sun
    The album is often as strong as Fountains Of Wayne's Welcome Interstate Managers.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Armchair Apocrypha
    The opaqueness of Bird's lyrics doesn't exactly jibe with this more mainstream musical approach.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cerulean Salt
    This is an album of unlikely dichotomies: of confidence and vulnerability, of yearning and forgetting, and of the simultaneous danger and attractiveness of self-destruction.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    True Love Cast Out All Evil
    It's hard to tell how much of the success here stems from Sheff's handling of the material or how well Erickson would come across on his own, but the fact remains that he's still capable of producing strong material, a fact that True Love Cast Out All Evil proves, without making a display of this revitalization.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    DISCO
    While the album might be a purely derivative work, its period arrangements—all sweeping disco strings, Nile Rodgers-esque guitar licks, and indiscriminately deployed cowbell—are executed with aplomb.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    High Places
    Each track is a similar hodgepodge of found sounds and melodic junk, teetering precariously on the edge of becoming a discombobulated mess, but no moment on the album sounds out of control or wasted.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What Now
    Sonically, it’s a triumph, a delicately textured musical realm that begs to be luxuriated in. What’s missing is the same level of songwriting that elevated Howard’s previous work. There are a few standout tracks, but no burrowing hooks on the level of “Don’t Wanna Fight” or “Stay High.” The only time she comes close to those earlier songs is on the propulsive “Red Flags.”
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spirituals
    Her least celebratory album to date, Spirituals is nonetheless ornate and often frenetic, managing to give her pent-up anxiety a kind of release.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There Is No Enemy
    With the talent on display here, there's every reason to believe that the man will deliver another classic Built to Spill record someday. This isn't one, but in its best moments (and many of it's merely good moments), you'll be surprised at how little you mind.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pura Vida Conspiracy
    Gogol Bordello's energy and optimism can grow exhausting, and even if their product has begun to feel familiar, they still sound unlike any other band on the planet, and it's hard not to be charmed by the fervor with which they keep seeking out new borders to cross and uninitiated listeners to welcome into their always hospitable tribe.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Echoes of Silence
    Disappointing as Echoes of Silence may be as a collection of songs, it nonetheless serves its purpose in giving the Weeknd's triptych a suitably grim finale.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. M
    Presenting musical and lyrical content in discrete halves, it functions as a microcosm of the kind of balance that makes Lambchop great, a poetic focus on words that doesn't scrimp on the music.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Three
    Three represents only an incremental progression, not the seismic shift of Voices, but it demonstrates the duo's ability to transform darkness into light, taking personal tragedy and shaping it into professional growth.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hello Happiness
    It’s worth applauding Khan, who turns 66 next month, for continuing to make an album as vital and contemporary-sounding as Hello Happiness.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
    Though rose-colored, its sentiments don’t feel cheap because Mering’s buttery vibrato and earnest vocal performance ably convey the necessity of accepting a lack of assurance about the future while embracing temporary comfort.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Rainbows
    In Rainbows with the all-too-familiar stiff, programmed beats and strategically placed effects of '15 Steps,' but soon more organic elements (spare bass and leftfield guitar--literally, coming out of the left speaker) take center stage, rendering it one of the band's best hybrids in years.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Weathervanes
    Weathervanes, is thoroughly unoriginal in every way possible, even down to the Gibbard-esque vocals. Now, that sounds pretty damning, but fortunately their failures in ingenuity are easily made up in spectacle.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mirror Traffic
    His standard of work is so smart that the stupid parts come off refreshing, and even middle-range material like Mirror Traffic feels strikingly well-crafted.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cut the World [Live]
    Perhaps to some, the lack of a slow, methodical musical structure surrounding these thoughts, or the fact that in spelling his concerns out through conversation instead of veiled insinuation, he notably drops that perilous, outside-of-sane tremolo, might pull the curtains down around his highly cultivated dramaturgy. Only partially.... The rest of the album is more comparatively straightforward.
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