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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    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    God Save the Animals
    God Save the Animals feels like a culmination of Alex G’s work to date, encompassing the murkiness of his early songs, the rootsiness of 2017’s Rocket, and the eclecticism of 2019’s House of Sugar. It’s an emotionally and spiritually rewarding effort.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Most Normal
    Aside from sludge rock veterans like Cherubs or fellow experimentalists like Lightning Bolt, it’s hard to think of another act capable of creating such daringly deranged slabs of noise.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    World Record
    What’s left is Young’s preternatural gift for melody (most of this album’s songs started as hummable tunes that popped into his head on his daily walks), Crazy Horse’s enduring chemistry, Rubin’s less-is-more studio hand, and, of course, the most important subject there is: this old planet.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    La La Land
    Not only does the band’s output remain as inexhaustible and freewheeling as ever, the album stands as some of their best late-career work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All Fiction
    Their unwillingness to resort to cheap pop gestures stands out in an era where few acts even bother to cloak their crass commercialism. But above all stands the music, and All Fiction—the title of which is a reference to our culture’s increasingly fractured ideas of what constitutes truth—marks yet another extraordinary entry in the band’s discography.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    WOW
    There’s also a strong sense of unity in how each song eventually comes together, and the album as a whole cohesively flows from one impressive moment to the next, ebbing and flowing between states of serenity and chaos.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rat Saw God
    All of the wobbling between tempos and styles might sound haphazard, but it’s executed with precision. And Hartzman’s snatches of Americana imagery—rain-rotted houses, parking lots, “piss-colored bright yellow Fanta”—ultimately cohere into an evocative portrait of the fringes of American life.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We’s numerous emotional peaks, from “Star” to “My Love Mine All Mine,” are so moving that the listener may also be convinced that love is a light in a dark world, a pillar of fire in the wilderness. Indeed, Mitski’s ability to pack so many gut-punches and inspired ideas into half an hour remains uncannily impactful.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Critterland
    Challenging, startling, and deeply powerful, this rallying closer confirms what the previous nine songs already suggested: that Carlisle is a singular artist and that Critterland is a worthy addition to the canon of country-folk classics.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    COWBOY CARTER
    It’s an album of Americana not in the banal, produced-by-Dave Cobb sense, but in the truest senses of narrative and musical form.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All Born Screaming
    The album finds Clark at her most fragile and ferocious, seeking beauty among the waste and wreckage of 21st-century life. Itself a beautifully ugly thing, All Born Screaming is a visceral examination of art and nature when both are pushed to the brink.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Cherry
    Goldfrapp know how to draw you in and, more importantly, hook you.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Martha Wainwright
    Martha has proven to be not just a worthy pupil of such domestic tutelage, but a musician of equal caliber.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Anniemal
    Annie the songwriter is breathless and unsure of herself, her voice barely registering above a church-wafer-thin whisper for most of the record.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Multiply
    An album that, in its best moments, draws comparisons to at-peak Prince and, at its worst, lands in the respectable company of Nikka Costa’s Everybody Got Their Something.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wikked Lil' Grrrls
    Establishes her as the progenitor of what could be called electro-ethno-pop.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Back Room
    Leavening the melancholy with a tense, literate sense of foreboding, The Back Room flows like an obsidian wave from first song to last.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twin Cinema
    Best (and nearly perfect) when taken two or three songs at a time, as an entire album, Twin Cinema overstays its welcome. It's simply too much of a good thing.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Why Should The Fire Die?
    While their lyrics do tell compelling stories, Nickel Creek's selling point remains their technical gifts and, again, Why Should The Fire Die? showcases a phenomenal learning curve.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oh No
    While there's nothing at all revolutionary in the band's combination of nihilistic lyrics and sunny pop hooks or in their use of dance rhythms behind their guitar power chords, it's nonetheless rare to encounter a major label pop or rock album as start-to-finish good as is Oh No.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Takk...
    As music that's beautiful simply for the sake of being beautiful, Takk… is an unqualified success.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Extraordinary Machine
    For every song that's been improved there's one that's been unnecessarily tooled with.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Z
    Dialing down the reverb and allowing more wide-ranging influences to show through, My Morning Jacket fashions a messy, transitory record that's head-over-heels giddy, curiously experimental, and patently weird in equal measure.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tournament Of Hearts
    There have been better albums released in 2005 than Tournament Of Hearts, but it's probably the album most ideally suited to be a left-field commercial success.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mouse And The Mask
    The Mouse and the Mask, while it may not be answering life's questions, is an enjoyable and highly original achievement.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Descended Like Vultures
    If not as easy to embrace as its predecessor, the album compensates with a great deal more ambition in its scope.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alive And Wired
    What Alive & Wired does best is reconcile the considerable charms of the band's studio output with the immediacy of their live shows' energy, and the Old 97's captured on this essential double-album is a band that lands at the midpoint between Wilco's high-minded songcraft and the ball-busting rock swagger of Drive-By Truckers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Confessions On A Dance Floor
    One of the few pop singers whose albums are best appreciated in their entirety and not lopped off into "hit singles," Madonna... has succeeded at creating a dance-pop odyssey with an emotional, if not necessarily narrative, arc.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Greatest
    A stirring, raw masterpiece.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Comfort Of Strangers
    Orton's assured hand throughout marks Comfort Of Strangers as a sturdy piece of songwriting that will stand among the more memorable albums of 2006 come year's end.
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