Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,122 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: 1,692 out of 3122
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3122
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3122
3122 music reviews
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    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dawn FM
    Rather than looking outward or upward, though, Dawn FM is a woozy, psychedelic deep dive inside the artist’s famously twisted psyche.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    KEYS
    A compilation of the most successful tracks from both halves of Keys would have made for a slightly stronger album. As is, though, it serves as a testament to both Keys’s strengths and weaknesses as a singer-songwriter—and her willingness to expand beyond the boundaries of genre constraints.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    30
    On 30, she displays the confidence to share her boldest vocal, stylistic, and thematic interests.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Red (Taylor's Version)
    While the two versions of “All Too Well” are the most obvious examples of that skill, it’s the editing over the entirety of Red that elevates it from an album that seemed destined to be remembered as a transitional work in Swift’s catalog into a confident, refined album that demands inclusion in the pop canon.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Raise The Roof
    Raise the Roof could have emphasized the differences between its many musical differences, but instead, Plant and Krauss unify them.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Things Take Time, Take Time
    A fully realized crystallization of her melodic instincts and the themes that she’s previously explored. She wrote most of the album in 2020, holed up alone in a Melbourne apartment while riding out the Covid-19 pandemic, and as such a sense of solitariness permeates its 10 songs.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Valentine
    If Lush presented a snapshot of a particular mindset, a woman trapped in a psychological limbo, Valentine captures the blurry nature of an inquiry still in progress.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ocean to Ocean
    With Ocean to Ocean, it seems as if Amos has all but given up on pushing the limits of her instrument. Which would be more forgivable if the songs themselves didn’t play it quite so safely.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Far In
    Exemplifying the album’s lo-fi aesthetic, these songs juxtapose staccato beats and watery synths, highlighting Lange’s knack for constructing minimally psychedelic but seductively melodic soundscapes.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Don't Live Here Anymore
    Though the War on Drugs may take a slightly more straightforward approach on I Don’t Live Here Anymore than they have in the past, they still find new ways to engage with complex arrangements. The result is a nimble balancing act of accessible pop-rock anthems and experimental soundscapes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blue Banisters
    By stripping back the sonic density of her previous work and taking its sweet time to unfold, Blue Banisters further fleshes out Del Rey’s increasingly vivid personal world.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sympathy for Life
    Sympathy for Life lacks the emotional vulnerability of 2016’s Human Performance and, despite some entrancing synths, the zany eclecticism of 2018’s Wide Awake! But the charm of A. Savage and Andrew Brown’s lackadaisical voices and chummy melodies haven’t lost a bit of their allure.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lately
    Lately reveals itself to be Hiatt’s most daring and experimental work to date. The songs’ relative lack of polish knocks down what few layers of pretense may have previously existed between the listener and the characteristically unvarnished inner thoughts that compose most of her lyrics.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Illusory Walls
    When the album’s key thematic line appears toward the end of the song—“The objects we’re locked in, immobile and violent/Just fewer like that, fewer afraid”—it feels like the awakening that the band has been building toward all along.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All Day Gentle Hold!
    All Day Gentle Hold is rife with expressive touches that point to Maine’s growing confidence, and the feeling of access to his innermost thoughts accentuates the album’s tenderness.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let Me Do One More
    As a whole, Let Me Do One More is more punk than its predecessor, and like Australian punk-rockers Amyl and the Sniffers, Tudzin weaves the personal with the political and—in a way that’s as clever as it is uncomfortable—economics with love.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Remember Her Name
    Guyton’s wide-ranging vocals have a way of investing even the weakest tracks on Remember Her Name with a freshness and power, sometimes belting an octave or two higher in a way that emphasizes the weight that her words carry.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dawn of Chromatica
    If the original album favored pop hooks over musical invention, many of the versions on Dawn of Chromatica are noisy or just plain tuneless.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Montero
    Lil Nas’s expressions of anxiety and self-doubt are served with honesty and tenderness, as well as some awkwardness.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Certified Lover Boy
    Drake comes across as an artist who’s bought into his mythos and persona a bit too ardently. ... The production on Certified Lover Boy is svelte yet airless, filled with lots of solemn piano lines and muted snares but absent of big flourishes or attempts at pop crossover. It’s an approach that’s likely aiming for tasteful restraint, but the effect is languid and rather directionless.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hey What
    The album seamlessly blends the nightmarish and the romantic, interweaving our perennial hopes and the terrors we can’t shake off.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star-Crossed
    Musgraves’s follow-up, Star-Crossed, is just as effortlessly melodic and accessible. But it’s also more eclectic, far afield of modern radio tropes, either of the pop or country varieties.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Donda
    With Donda, he’s crafted his most unforgiving self-portrait yet, one that, like the best works that plumb a person’s inner depths, winds up reflecting our collective imperfections.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power
    If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is ultimately rather straightforward, reprising many of the themes—self-doubt, self-sabotage, self-empowerment—that have been central to Halsey’s past work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last?
    For the most part, though, it’s the album’s more stylistically adventurous songs—like the propulsive “Easy to Sabotage” and “Reese,” which hits on a very particular sort of ‘70s-style jazz-inflected folk-rock also recently explored by the likes of Clairo and St. Vincent—that leave the greatest impression.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Screen Violence
    Screen Violence matches the urgency of its sound with the weight of its content. ... Four albums in, Chvrches have honed their pop craft and, by extension, their ability to transform hopelessness into inspiration.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Solar Power
    On the whole, the 12 songs here are quieter, more meditative, and more grown-up than Lorde’s past efforts. But while Solar Power doesn’t traffic in the booming emotional catharsis of Melodrama, it doesn’t succumb to navel-gazing solipsism either.
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