Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,120 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: 1,690 out of 3120
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3120
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3120
3120 music reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jump Rope Gazers
    Songs like “Dying to Believe” and “Out of Sight” keep this energy going, with drummer Tristan Deck and bassist Benjamin Sinclair maintaining a brisk rhythm section as Stokes and Jonathan Pearce’s guitars shimmer, groove, and ignite in equal measure. But the Beths are, perhaps, at their best when they’re at their breeziest.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    KiCk i
    By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca’s career, the album is a celebration of actualization, whether that’s spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What's Your Pleasure?
    What’s Your Pleasure? is an album that, just a few months ago, might have felt like a nostalgia trip or a guilty pleasure, but now feels like manna for the soul.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mordechai
    Mordechai finds Khruangbin coming into their own, thanks to the band’s lyrical development and the honing of their fusion of intercontinental influences. As the adage goes, there’s nothing new under the sun, but Mordechai makes a case that maybe there just might be.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    As with his best work, Rough and Rowdy Ways encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster that can be clearly discerned but rarely summarized in the most turbulent of ages.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shadow Offering
    Demonstrating their versatility throughout the album, Braids locate something of a sweet spot, embracing a restrained plainspokenness without completely veering from the outré flourishes and melancholic, midtempo jams that are their specialty.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet's Mad
    While it’s culled from a mélange of styles and influences, Planet’s Mad manages to stand on its own for its sonic depth and detail. And even if the album’s themes aren’t fully articulated, Baauer’s use of bass, constantly elongating and amplifying, succeeds to evoking a sense of doom.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homegrown
    The album turns out to be missing link in Young’s catalog as much for Shakey’s emotional life as it is for his stylistic choices.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Punisher
    These songs simmer beautifully and quietly, eventually boiling over in intermittent moments of sonic boisterousness, and the results are often stunning.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    RTJ4
    Structurally inventive, lyrically deft, passionate and heartbroken, RTJ4 positions Run the Jewels as the laureates of our collapsing era.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    WUNNA
    At 50 minutes, the album’s length isn’t an issue, but one wishes that Gunna had selected a fraction of these 18 tracks and expanded them past the two-minute mark and cut filler like “Blindfold,” “Met Gala,” and “I’m on Some.”
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dedicated Side B
    The dozen songs that comprise Dedicated Side B, all leftovers from the original recording sessions, are less musically adventurous than those particular tracks, but they double down on pillow talk, lending the album a uniformity that its predecessor lacked.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chromatica
    Whether muddling the creation of the universe with both love and fame (“Sine from Above”) or teasing the theory of the world as a simulation (“Enigma”), these songs only scratch the surface of deeper ideas before falling back on the most basic of pop clichés.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Notes on a Conditional Form
    It might not live up to its lofty goals, but the sheer amount of daring on Notes on a Conditional Form solidifies the four guitar-wielding dudes of the 1975 as the biggest, boldest, and brashest purveyors of something resembling what we used to call rock n’ roll, which, as Healy knows well, was always at least as much a pose as a sound. He wears it well.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    how i'm feeling now
    Though she recorded the album in a home studio, Charli didn’t limit her ambition and, as a result, manages to surprise both musically and lyrically throughout.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Quickies
    Merritt’s ability to blend comedy and heartache through finely observed character studies is one of his greatest strengths, and that skill in fine form throughout Quickies.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sings Elvis
    At this point in his own career, Danzig may still be able to approximate Elvis’s vocal range, but he fails to invest these songs with a unique vision.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Petals for Armor
    Petals for Armor is a confident solo debut that suggests Williams has valences she’s just beginning to explore.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Making a Door Less Open
    A set of dizzyingly creative and often uncategorizable songs.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dear Life
    Ultimately, Benson’s impeccable melodic instincts justify Dear Life’s largely featherweight tone.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    On a purely musical level, it’s a bold experiment in pop craft, a collection of songs on which Apple stretches her talents in adventurous new directions. ... Fetch the Bolt Cutters is Apple’s most timely—and timeless—effort yet.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Knuckleball Express
    Knuckleball Express may well be the most accessible entry in the musician’s vast catalogue. It’s not a compromise or sell-out, but rather a welcome implementation of his talents to the foundational rock that’s always undergirded his sound and sensibility.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After Hours
    His most personal album to date.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Southside
    There are worse purveyors of bro-country spiced up with hip-hop (here’s looking at you, Florida Georgia Line), and Hunt has an ear for melody, but his reliance on lyrical clichés and hit-you-over-the-head genre fusion makes Southside worth little more than a shrug.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Walking Proof
    On Walking Proof, she’s emerged wiser and more confident, ready even to dispense advice of her own. She also finds herself in full command of her broad stylistic palette, melding influences as disparate as backwoods country and garage punk into a cohesive signature sound.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Future Nostalgia
    Occasionally, the album’s commitment to juxtaposition feels strained. ... At just 37 minutes, however, Future Nostalgia seems to understand that the best diversions are as fleeting as they are exhilarating, so we should enjoy them while we can.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saint Cloud
    The songs here are at once deeply intimate and broadly accessible, like selections from an alternative universe where modern mainstream country radio isn’t all pandering, homogenized slop.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gigaton
    Pearl Jam has been locked in cruise control since the late ‘90s, and their latest, Gigaton, is largely more of the same.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Silver Landings
    By drawing on the sounds of ‘70s singer-songwriters, Moore has successfully completed the transition from her teen-pop origins to adult troubadour.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Traditional Techniques
    Traditional Techniques is less a revealing personal statement than a change of palette, with the singer-songwriter coloring his usual sarcastic wit with somber, muted tones.
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