Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,118 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: 1,688 out of 3118
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3118
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3118
3118 music reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Piano & A Microphone 1983
    The first half of Piano & a Microphone 1983 unfolds as a kind of stream-of-consciousness medley. ... The album’s three previously unreleased songs are also of note, even if they’re just rough drafts.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blunderbuss
    Blunderbuss feel satisfying, but not astoundingly progressive. It's a solo debut that can be interpreted in two ways, with White either easing his way into a new template or putting window dressing on the same old ideas.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Love
    It's a dazzling, expansive experience that ranks among the year's best.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Open Your Heart
    Open Your Heart shows off a hugely expanded range of influences and an unerring sense of pacing.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Attack On Memory
    Cloud Nothings have never sounded so sure of their abilities, and with such a stunning step forward in their cohesiveness and vision, it's easier than ever to imagine them becoming a genuinely great rock band.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like Red On A Rose
    What surprises most about Like Red On A Rose is how well this departure suits Jackson.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    case/lang/veirs
    case/lang/veirs flows like a conversation and negotiation between three women who've done the same thing, but in different ways, now learning the world through each other's eyes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Still Brazy
    Make no mistake--musically and lyrically, this is an expansion.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wildflower
    For those fascinated by the Avalanches's process, as opposed to merely impressed by its most endearing results, Wildflower is a rewarding and challenging listen.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2
    With Hot Sauce Committee, it's advisable to always expect the unexpected.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sour
    Like Eilish and Lorde before her, Rodrigo possesses both a knack for stealthy pop hooks and a vocal control beyond her years. And even if Sour doesn’t quite transcend its myriad influences, it might at least inspire her fans to Google the Piano Man.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Skying
    While in some sense these tracks are truer to the band's past than Skying's more formally ambitious cuts, that only convinces me that the Horror's biggest leaps forward are the ones in which they follow other musician's great ideas to new places.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Ghosts of Highway 20
    The Ghosts of Highway 20 is otherwise characterized by its consistency, but what really sets it apart from Williams's previous album is its sense of emotional balance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rival Dealer [EP]
    Wintry sonic atmospheres, a motley chorus of voices, and a life-affirming message of salvation--intentionally or not, Burial might have just released the best Christmas album of the year.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wrangled
    A brave album from a country singer who's still finding herself, suggests that it's never too late to lift yourself up.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's Almost Dry
    The intricately constructed It’s Almost Dry is still part of a now decades-long roll-out attesting to his bravado—and we’re not complaining.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Eye Contact
    That's not to say Gang Gang Dance has watered down its style; rather than some strategic reach toward mass appeal, Eye Contact represents a pruning of the superfluous.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)
    Badu's spare, pointillist lyrics are almost constantly folded deep within dense, heavy arrangements
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Special Affections
    O'Regan's voice is the centerpiece. Unlike seemingly every other bedroom music maker these days, there's a real power and discernable confidence to his croon.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wounded Rhymes
    Wounded Rhymes is filled with gorgeously spiteful moments such as these, adding an obstinate wrinkle to the album's already-rich, shadowy mystique.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fear Fun
    These are songs about trying to find onself, realizing how cliché that quest is, and then further realizing that there's no choice but to push through anyway.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mountain Soul II
    It's still a beautifully crafted, expertly performed record (and certainly a standout in what has been a pretty wretched year for country music), but the scope and thoughtfulness that made "Mountain Soul" such a treasure are absent.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Megafaun
    Though they challenge genre convention with their choices of instruments and ambitious arrangements, Megafaun have made careful, spot-on assessments of what actually works within the framework of traditional roots music.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Centralia
    Centralia is the most sophisticated and cultivated Mountains album to date.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brighter Than Creation's Dark
    As is, it's a sporadically brilliant effort by an exceptional band whose reach still sometimes exceeds their grasp.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hunter
    As a first stab in the direction of avant-garde pop-metal, The Hunter is pretty damn compelling.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    softscars
    The album’s consistent layer of distortion and commitment to brooding unify the songs and solidify Yeule’s unique, and grim, musical style. With Softscars, Yeule expands, refines, and masters their creative vision.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wild Flag
    Beyond comparisons to Sleater-Kinney's past work, the album functions as an intriguing first effort, jagged but routinely promising.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Swim
    Other songs exploit vocals more overtly, but the words still never quite feel like the point, oblique and fuzzy, couched in landscapes that have far too much else going on.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harlem River Blues
    Given Earle's often morose and sardonic bent as a lyricist, the shift toward blues suits him well, making for his strongest album to date.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love vs Money
    Instead of begging to be repeated, the rest of the album's songs are best savored as a whole--a weird assessment of an R&B album, which usually sink or swim on their ability to capture you right away.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
    Williams has assembled many guest musicians this time around, but despite all the disparate talent, the album is a tight, coherent work that never devolves into self-indulgent jamming, even at an epic 103 minutes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blackbirds
    Blackbirds [is] just a hair less successful than Peters's last album, 2012's Hello Cruel World, a self-described "manifesto" that cultivated a level of consistency not quite matched here. But the strength of the new album is less that of its constituent parts than the sum of their focus, and that's by design.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Expert in a Dying Field
    The group’s third album, Expert in Dying Field, is an exhilarating power-pop tour de force, replete with bristling guitar riffs and bright, infectious harmonies. It’s also a devastating exploration of anxiety, insecurity, and regret—a reflection of how, in life, there can be no true joy without sadness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Noise
    However precious his choice of sounds might be, Black Noise nonetheless impresses for its forward-thinking and even robust approach to contemporary dance music.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Visiter
    And speaking of nervous systems, if Visiter doesn't make you tap, nod, shake, or just plain move, then you don't have one.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Goodnight Rhonda Lee
    Everything on Goodnight Rhonda Lee is immediate. Throughout, Atkins’s lyrics eschew metaphor in favor of a more confessional mode, and her arrangements are punchy and direct.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Haram
    In many ways a critique of the legacy of slavery and colonialism, Haram possesses a manic, catastrophic atmosphere.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nikki Nack
    Rarely does an album consider life's eternal struggles in quite this way: searching for answers with its eyes wide open, and silly string in its hair.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Soused
    Another album which, if not exactly pleasant to listen to, is at least experimentally interesting, continuing Walker's aggressive program of abrasive sonic assaults.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Four the Record
    Without a thematic through line or recurring lyrical motifs or meaningful efforts at myth-building or any of the other sophisticated flourishes that have made her albums so rich, Four the Record is left as a solid collection of better-than-average songs cast in arrangements that offer a progressive take on modern country.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships
    This is a content-saturated album for a content-saturated world. Here, there’s real substance and there’s total fluff, and it’s up to us to find out what’s worth listening to.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wall of Eyes
    Whether Wall of Eyes is a last stop for the Smile or merely a layover to some yet-undefined place, it’s an undeniably mesmerizing trip.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lianne La Havas
    The album instantly feels more purposeful than its predecessor: Where Blood can feel labored over, perhaps too hungry for hits, Lianne La Havas isn’t seemingly beholden to such expectations.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star Wars
    Turns out Wilco are still full of surprises.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Goths
    Darnielle deftly weaves through memories of an impressionable period in his life and its accompanying soundtrack while avoiding the pitfall of nostalgia or sentimentalism for the music of his youth.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Gangster
    He's not a real gangster, but he is a real poet. And like the greatest of American poets, he admits that, very well then, he contradicts himself. American Gangster contains multitudes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Slave Vows
    It is hardcore, a visceral distillation of fury that aims to wound.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Life Will See You Now
    It once again finds Lekman employing striking sensory imagery in his acutely detailed recollections about friends and lovers.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Up
    Black Up reveals Shabazz Palaces as an artist much more in line with the future, voicing his dissatisfaction by carving his own path.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hive Mind
    The result is the Internet’s most musically diverse and synergetic album to date.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    B'lieve I'm Goin' Down
    Perhaps a bit too reticent for its own good, B'lieve I'm Goin Down still rewards close listening, steadily developing into an album that's as multifaceted and profound as its mysterious creator.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Whole Love
    The Whole Love easily represents the Wilco's most adventurous and fully realized work in years.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blue and Lonesome
    hough the Stones are firing on all cylinders throughout Blue & Lonesome, and to a greater extent than they have in decades, they’re hamstrung by the inherent limitations of only playing Chicago blues covers; there are only so many 12- and 16-bar blues tunes you can string together in a row.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Teen Dream
    Beach House makes it easy on Teen Dream, supplying an intense but transparent sheen of iridescent sound, marking an album whose quality is almost instantly evident. Better than anything in recent memory, the album typifies the difference between sonic interference as an instrumental tool and a blanket to hide beneath.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Option Paralysis
    It's clear that Option Paralysis is difficult by design, but the upshot is that anyone who can make it through the first two tracks will probably find one of their favorite albums of the year.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sebenza
    The expertly produced Sebenza creates a flowing, carnival atmosphere packed with ideas and stripped of the pomposity often associated with world music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nine Types of Light
    Nine Types of Light may fall somewhat short in comparison with TV on the Radio's other albums, but it's a strong, smart effort from a band that continues to push resolutely forward.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is Country Music
    Even when the album isn't up to Paisley's typical standards, This Is Country Music is still an interesting, ambitious project from a man who need not apologize for the things he does awfully well.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Years
    Her music boasts the building blocks of potential crossover success: impeccable compositional construction; a distinctive songwriting voice; superb musicianship. For now, Shook is content to wallow in country's grimy underbelly, embracing the genre's traditional tropes while pushing them to unexpected places.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Utopia
    The bit of dead weight here [the album's excessive duration] is especially frustrating, since Björk seems to have reconjured the elements that made her music so exceptional, and consistently enough that one can imagine a shorter, more curated iteration of Utopia that could stand with her very best albums.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cousin
    Though these tracks are perfectly adequate, even pretty (especially the vocal melodies on “Evicted”), it’s disappointing to see the band play it safe on an album that aims to be their most adventurous in years. Of course, the band proves that they can still write pensive ballads without succumbing to the clichés of contemporary indie music.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Crack The Skye
    Crack the Skye presents a stunningly original fusion of sounds.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Electric Lady
    These two discs capture, in far more disciplined fashion than her debut, the motley delights of this singer and self-styled savant, whose delivery is as impressive and singular as her dance moves.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper
    Grim Reaper is consistently engaging, often catchy, and sometimes disarmingly pretty.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Freetown Sound
    Freetown Sound certainly has the sprawl, hyperactivity, and potential of a personal masterwork, but its master is more conduit and conductor than confessor.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Singles
    Though rock has always been the ideal genre for artists to explore entropy, Herring and his bandmates have somehow found a way to inject what is arguably the safest kind of music, adult pop, with their own weird brand of controlled chaos.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Made a Place
    Oldham’s albums as Bonnie “Prince” Billy always achieve a cohesiveness that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts, and I Made a Place is no exception.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Collapse [EP]
    For a once-hermetic artist, James's recent output has trended toward greater accessibility, but even by that measure, Collapse's biggest surprise lies in how warm and inviting it all is.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Follow the Cyborg
    Unfortunately, the album’s avoidance of conventional pop structures means these songs fail to lodge in your mind, but Miss Grit sings with a plainspoken, almost whispery intimacy that’s hard to shake.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Underdressed at the Symphony
    Not content to be tied to a single genre, location, or mood, Webster finds pleasure in the discomfort of feeling like she doesn’t belong.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Love Streams
    Simply enough, Love Streams is a discomforting listen, and the addition of voices to Hecker's repertoire adds an additional tool of disorientation to his web of repurposed crackles and spurts, not the warmth one might expect.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In the End It Always Does
    Initially, the musician’s sophomore effort, In the End It Always Does, seems to follow suit, with a summery ambience, songs about emotional distance, and her unmistakable voice. As the album unfolds, though, her approach feels like it’s been flipped, with vocal hooks taking a backseat to highly textured folktronica instrumentation and a more impressionistic rendering of desire.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Weather
    She's always been an insightful and empathetic observer of the human condition, but Weather is such a heady album because of how unflinchingly Ndegeocello has turned her keen observational eyes toward herself.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Demon Days
    Demon Days is decidedly bleaker than its predecessor.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ghost to a Ghost/Gutter Town
    Williams made some pretty great records during his tenure at Curb, but Ghost to a Ghost/Gutter Town suggests that he's only just begun to showcase his apparently boundless creativity and breadth of his artistic vision.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mirrored Aztec
    Not all of Mirrored Aztec is as great as “Thank You Jane” or any of the previously mentioned highlights.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Anak Ko
    While it might lack a rave-up pop number like Everybody Works’s infectious “1 Billion Dogs,” Anak Ko offers plenty of reasons to follow Duterte down whatever road may lay ahead.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Monitor
    The Monitor is an album about perpetual rebellion, and whether that strikes you as exciting or wearying will have a great bearing on how much you get out of it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wide Awake!
    With Danger Mouse's help, the band has crafted a diverse and intrepid album, stepping out of their comfort zone musically while also exuding a trenchant political posture.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Renaissance
    The Renaissance Q-Tip reaffirms his stature as one of the hip-hop greats by waxing unassuming, cool-headed and wise.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
    Consistently literate and full of the comfortable resonance of his unique voice, Eagle once again proves Callahan to be as ageless as the forest.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shadows in the Night
    The songs chosen are elegiac, and Dylan balances out any hints of winking self-awareness by freighting his new compositions with a heavy air of wistful sadness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Do You Like Rock Music?
    For all the strength of the variously loud and soft moments throughout Do You Like Rock Music?, the record is at its best when the band attempts to holistically integrate the two.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This Is It & I Am It & You Are It & So Is That & He Is It & She Is It & It Is It & That Is That
    It's taut, aggressive, accomplished and is "it" in every way the title suggests. And that is that.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunken Condos
    It's an album built on monotony that still has a sense of narrative.
    • 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
    Fade
    In collaborating with McEntire, Yo La Tengo has found a format that accommodates their ever-adventurous musical excursions while beckoning new listeners unaccustomed to 15-minute instrumental soundscapes.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heavy is the Head
    Stormzy sounds more natural than most in his oscillation between the streetwise rude boy and the silky lover man. ... There are a few clunkers on this overstuffed album.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Car
    The direction they’ve taken here finds them flexing their muscles in a way that sheds the cheeky irony of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino in favor of a more plaintive earnestness, while at the same time building on that album’s sense of adventure.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    4:44
    There's not a wasted moment on this rare Jay-Z album that's too taut and focused for crossover singles or distractions from its central thesis. He takes 4:44 seriously but doesn't forget to have fun along on the way.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Everything Is Alive
    Everything Is Alive may not boast the lo-fi grit of Slowdive’s earlier work, but the band’s skill for scrupulous melodies is undiminished here. The album evolves Slowdive’s well-established sound with more electronic textures, creating a conceptual sonic landscape that buzzes with life.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Doris
    Earl may be one of the quieter voices on Doris, but his dense, evocative sensibility dominates the album both lyrically and musically, making for exciting confirmation that one of rap's most technically accomplished voices has also got his conceptual vision firmly in place.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Dreaming Fields
    While it's easy to miss the occasional flash of wiseass wit from her earlier albums, it's clear that Berg understands the relationship between the production and content of a song.
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