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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    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ugly Season
    The album serves as a beautiful dissection of dance as action and concept. Beyond that, it’s the most experimental Perfume Genius effort to date, and a bold addition to an already impeccable discography.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Farm to Table
    In casting off the lo-fi chaos of Live Forever and, thankfully, most of its flirtations with hip-hop, Bartees strikes a somewhat anonymous note with this album’s well-executed but rather straightforward rock, replete with several showy guitar solos.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    EYEYE
    The lack of momentum caused by the absence of a consistent beat serves, almost paradoxically, to envelop us in Eyeye’s often mesmerizing cinematic textures. ... But while most of Eyeye’s trappings as a chronicle of a breakup are successful, sometimes Li’s writing can too blatantly underline her concepts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Some Nights I Dream of Doors
    In much the same way that he juxtaposes Afropop and R&B, Obongjayar alternates between modes of vulnerability and swagger throughout Some Nights I Dream of Doors.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
    Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers can be emotionally ugly and unpleasant, but it never feels less than completely authentic to Lamar’s personal journey. It’s thankfully levied with glimpses of joy and melodic hooks.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry's House
    The album both sees Styles cementing his status as music’s premier sensitive, shy guy and growing comfortable enough within the pop idiom that he inhabits to push against it—but only ever so slightly. Styles may be a fashion trendsetter, but with Harry’s House, he continues trying on different styles in an effort to discover his own.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    WE
    The melodies and arrangements here are as excellent as they are predictable, and the band recaptures their classic sound on “The Lightning I, II,” with a comfortingly familiar blend of wide-open-skies Springsteen/U2 bombast and pour-out-your-heart emotionalism. But at times, especially toward the beginning of the album, WE takes a more tentative approach.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wet Tennis
    Wet Tennis stages a 35-minute dance party that’s tempered, as well as bolstered, by notes of reflective melancholy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Bit of Previous
    A Bit of Previous manages to strike a balance between celebrating the group’s familiar sound and proving that they still have something to say.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mahal
    At times, the album’s songs are so breezy that they’re barely indistinguishable from one another. There are moments here, as is Toro y Moi’s wont, where the pursuit of mood takes precedent above all else.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Serpentina
    Though she once again flashes her talent for delivering emotionally wrought tales of heartbreak, Serpentina asserts its uniqueness in paradoxically conventional and unsurprising ways.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fear of the Dawn
    An entire album of similar songs might have felt like a retread. But on Fear of the Dawn, they’re rewards for experiencing something very rare: a long-established artist intent on pushing boundaries further than he ever has before.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    (Watch My Moves)
    He doesn’t bring his roguish charm to his latest. Though this album will satisfy those nostalgic for the mellower side of ‘70s and ‘90s rock, it doesn’t chart new terrain for Vile.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chloe and the Next 20th Century
    The album doesn’t possess the observational heft of 2017’s Pure Comedy, a post-apocalyptic survey of America’s anxieties and lamentable cultural habits. Rather, the narratives and wordplay found on Chloë and the Next 20th Century, while at times evocative given Tillman’s way with language, are comparatively toothless and too clever by half.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gifted
    Koffee is charming and winningly wholesome in the first mode [expressing her gratitude to be alive], but her attempts to meld tributes to family and life’s simplicities with designer name drops and empty boasts can feel awkward and misplaced. ... An album that doesn’t always play to its young creator’s strengths.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Motomami
    In taking bits and fragments from both her previous work and that of her contemporaries, Rosalía has fashioned an album rife with the contradictory sounds, lyrical themes, and artistic impulses of the past and present.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Labyrinthitis
    As danceable and often hooky as these songs are, there’s still a sense of reclusiveness, an inscrutability, that permeates the album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Warm Chris
    Harding continues to exercise her versatility and restraint, delivering an album that invites close attention and rewards it with understated surprises.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crash
    Though Charli’s latest jettisons some of the sonic adventurousness of her past releases, it still finds the singer workshopping the reckless abandon of her persona.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Classic Objects
    Perhaps above all else, Classic Objects is thoughtful or, really, defined by thought. The song structures are clever, the production is deeply layered, and the lyrics, which largely catalog Hval’s thoughts, are writerly and complex.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Prey//IV
    While the choice to end Prey//IV with its most downcast song might feel like a relinquishing of the power that Glass has claimed, it grounds the album’s brutality in reality, poignantly reminding us that this is a document of Glass’s lived experiences.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LIFE ON EARTH
    The album takes the listener on a journey—one that’s as satisfying as it is because Hurray for the Riff Raff covers so much new musical territory with such self-assuredness, from guitar-heavy indie rock (“Pointed at the Sun”) to folk-punk (“Rhododendron”) to hip-hop (“Precious Cargo”). Indeed, with Life on Earth, they’ve achieved something truly enviable: a fresh start.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Once Twice Melody
    Beach House’s hymn to the grandeur of relationships is, perhaps, the most musically diverse and thematically mature project the duo has released to date—an emphatic affirmation of life’s joys and sorrows.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lucifer on the Sofa
    Spoon has hit something of a dead end with Lucifer on the Sofa. The album gestures toward breaking free of old habits, but it doesn’t present any new ones, musically or otherwise.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You
    Despite tracks that feel unfinished or experiments gone awry, Big Thief’s artistic vision is more diverse and fully realized on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You than on any of their past releases.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Time Skiffs
    The album finds Animal Collective gracefully adapting their kaleidoscopic, existentially focused songs to the universal theme of life’s ephemerality. By definition it just means we’re hearing some vitality elude them too, as their usually energetic music gives way to wistful reflection.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Laurel Hell
    ["Should’ve Been Me" is] a fascinating, fresh take on relationship dynamics that makes much of the rest of Laurel Hell sound boilerplate by comparison.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Motordrome
    When Ørsted ramps up the bombast, Motordrome reaches a serviceable level of pop pageantry. But most of the singer’s cooed melodies feel comparatively half-hearted. Ultimately, the album has a way of getting your attention and failing to keep it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sick!
    Despite its scattered tone and occasionally underwhelming performances, though, Sick! is an important reminder of Earl’s skills as a poet of despair who’s unafraid to mine his own struggles in order to make sense of what’s happening around him.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Boy Named If
    The tail-end of The Boy Named If finds Costello suddenly back in crooner mode with the soft-shoe swing of “Trick Out the Truth” and the moonstruck “Mr. Crescent.” Both tracks are quietly exquisite and provide a comedown from the adrenaline-fueled highs of the album’s first half. They underscore the ways in which The Boy Named If is as complete and often thrilling as anything Costello has recorded in years.
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