Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,117 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: 1,687 out of 3117
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3117
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3117
3117 music reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Actor
    Her voice seems small and fragile, but it's her most effective instrument, and it affixes a tight lynchpin to the album's broadly creative themes, leaving it glistening with ghostly elegance.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sing the Delta
    Sing the Delta... conveys a one-of-a-kind perspective that, somehow, manages to be as unassuming and humble as it is powerful and authoritative.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Animals In The Dark
    His voice leads the material along, punching up the momentum of the heavier songs and providing an earthy low end for the simpler ones.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Horses and the Hounds
    The Horses and the Hounds proves that McMurtry’s nearly peerless ability to tear our hearts out with a good yarn hasn’t waned a bit.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    WIXIW
    WIXIW puls[es] with strange, inimitable energy.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Glacial Glow
    The album is a turning point for Lipstate, offering some of her most compositionally cohesive, refined songs, while managing to sacrifice none of the verve and licentiousness of her past work, which makes it the most complete-and most likely accessible-Noveller album to date.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    St. Elsewhere
    As we approach the halfway point of 2006, it's unlikely that a more vivid or arresting debut will drop this year, marking St. Elsewhere as not only an audacious accomplishment, but one of the year's best.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Home of the Mind
    Like an old church redesigned as luxury apartments, the album’s constant juxtaposition of chamber music and New Age minimalism can be forced and fatiguing. But its audaciousness is undisputable, never succumbing to the predictable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Drums And Guns
    The record is gloomy but never disturbing—a bummer that doesn't leave you bummed.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    War & Leisure
    Even if the commercial tea leaves don't come together in his favor, War & Leisure has shown that, artistically at least, Miguel is exactly where he needs to be.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Magic Whip
    The Magic Whip isn't a triumphant return of a Britpop champion; instead, it's a mature, measured document from a band that's never rested on its laurels.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yuck
    Their self-titled debut is a 12-track, 45-minute workout, and it so effectively hits you warm in the gut with distortion and stick-to-your-ribs melodies that you won't just wish you were 20 again; you'll realize there's no subscribed age qualification for that wonderful feeling you get while listening to this record.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Savage Mode II
    It’s Metro, though, who elevates 21’s stories to something approaching greatness. ... This sequel is a ratification of the “bigger and better,” an example of steady improvement through impeccable craft.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    FU##IN' UP
    Though Fu##in’ Up maintains the same track sequence as Ragged Glory, the titles have changed, each borrowing a lyric from the songs themselves. And when the album does deviate musically from its source material, it does so with subtlety and purpose.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Glowing Man
    Another bold, beautiful statement of purpose that also stands as a singularly menacing test of listener endurance.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Give Up The Ghost
    It's her dynamic performances and some inspired collaborators who understand her strengths--in addition to Rubin, Elton John livens up 'Caroline' with some rollicking, ragtime-y piano licks--that make Carlile's Ghost a worthwhile effort.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bad Debt [Reissue]
    For an album with a creation tale so bound up in contemporary history, Bad Debt is utterly ageless, like a surviving relic from time immemorial.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Transcendental Youth
    Transcendental Youth, Darnielle's strident delivery and all, can be an exercise in sadomasochism, but at times a very rich one. Still, Darnielle seems willing to walk over coals that most of us would rather experience secondhand.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thirstier
    Some of her most nuanced, delightfully disparate songs to date.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Microcastle
    In putting the brakes on their revolutionary impulses to instead embrace old tropes and familiar sounds, Deerhunter has hit upon an endearing, awesome universality.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crack-Up
    Crack-Up takes contrasting musical ideas and textures and makes them functional, if not transcendent. Ultimately, though, the album fails to shed much light on the mind of an artist more preoccupied with shrouding his songs in crashing waves, shadow, and smoke.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ForeverandEverNoMore
    The album is hampered by Eno’s overly didactic messaging. His pensively exhortative lyrics work fine within their specific contexts, where the songs themselves lean into the existential terror that their pessimistic worldviews provide. But on more delicate offerings, like “Icarus or Blériot” and “Sherry,” the songwriting feels counterintuitive to Eno’s elegant musicianship, becoming an obtrusive supplementary element.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Svengali
    Even the most dance-oriented songs on Bradshaw’s second studio album, Svengali, are mellower than his past efforts, especially his two Muvaland EPs. The album also brings a new conceptual focus to his work.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am Easy to Find
    One does eventually feel the album’s length, with the stretch of songs in between “You Left Your Soul with You” and “I Am Easy to Find” feeling comparatively pedestrian—the sounds of a band treading more familiar ground before really staring to take chances. But once they do, the sprawl quickly begins to justify itself, revealing some of the most ambitious music the National has ever made.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rainbow
    While it might not be the discovery of a new talent, it's certainly the deepening of an existing one—another in a long line of female pop stars initially given limited creative and professional agency now intent on exploding the patriarchy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Easy Wonderful
    These ideas are anything but easy, but on Easy Wonderful, Guster wraps its thoughtful approach to pop with the kind of outsized hooks that the band does better than just about anyone.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sweetener
    For the most part, though, the formula results in an album that's both consistent and refined, a reflection of Grande's growing awareness of herself as an artist and her place in the world.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Crossing
    Whether the album is supposed to be taken as a contemporary tale or something closer to a retelling of Escovedo's personal history matters because, frankly, times have changed. This is why the album's most universal songs have the most resonance.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Villains
    If anything, Villains could have used more overt pop influences, as it may have resulted in more delightfully wild experiments like the closing “Villains of Circumstance,” whose sulking verses contrast with sweeping, glitzy choruses to suggest Michael Bolton as a deranged Weimar-era cabaret singer.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Evangelist
    The album impresses as much for its craft as for the way it allows Forster to honor McLennan's passing even as it advances his own work.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kveikur
    If the intuitive, star-gazing Valtari served as the rediscovery of Sigur Rós's signature sound, then the instinctual, sober Kveikur is its compulsive reinvention.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
    An album of relatively accessible pop music that pulses with the pain of a life in pieces.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Age of Adz
    What makes The Age of Adz an exception rather than some blatant hat-tip to those artists is Stevens's quirky trademarks.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Break It Yourself
    Whereas on another album these kinds of sidepaths would be no more than frustrating distractions, here the scenery looks so good, you'll gladly take the long way home.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Replica
    It makes for a fascinating addition to the already-extensive OPN catalogue.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    If All I Was Was Black
    Of course, things were even more dire during the civil rights movement, and like the music that the Staple Singers produced during that era, If All I Was Was Black is hopeful and optimistic not in ignorance of political reality, but in spite of it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    ILYSM
    Taken individually, the songs on ILYSM are all downright gorgeous, but by the time you get to “War on Terror,” a trembling five-minute acoustic ballad, after a string of several other trembling five-minute acoustic ballads, things start to feel monotonous. Whatever Ross’s limitations as a singer and arranger, though, when he brings his guitar playing to the fore, the results are much more expressive and gratifying.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Offend Maggie
    Offend Maggie isn't a huge breakthrough for Deerhoof, but it's a step toward coherence with which few fans should have a problem.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sound & Color
    [Brittany Howard's] performance only confirms that she's the kind of pop vocal talent that only comes along a few times in a generation, while Sound & Color as a whole is proof that Alabama Shakes have got the chops to be a lot more than Muscle Shoals revivalists.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Icky Thump
    Though far from The White Stripes' best work, Icky Thump is still plenty good, brash, and noisy in the way great rock records are supposed to be.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Crying Light
    Antony's performances are always classy as well as unequivocally odd.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Freedom Highway
    The album is alive with energy and playfulness.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ventriloquism
    It turns commonly held conceptions of canon on their head, implicitly asks for a more inclusive understanding of song craft, and—most of all--celebrates a group of songs that resonate in a variety of contexts and arrangements.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs
    It all manages to hang together thanks to the fact that, after some trial and error, Wasner and Stack have hit on a sound all their own.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Have We Met
    Bejar the enigmatic, drunken poet has for several Destroyer albums now taken a back seat to Bejar the singer and bandleader. And while the singing on Have We Met remains tastefully restrained, lyrically there are glimpses of the younger, brasher Bejar here.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You Get What You Give
    Perhaps what's most encouraging about You Get What You Give, though, is that Zac Brown Band hasn't played it safe. Instead, they've played fast and loose with a set of influences that owe far less to country music than to Southern rock, jam bands, and reggae.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ratchet
    His winking in-jokes and one-liners might have gotten the Internet's attention, but Ratchet wins you over when it reveals that this smart-aleck's got a beating heart too.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Real Life Is No Cool
    Real Life Is No Cool is a creamy, luscious sequence of classically structured pop-funk tracks glittering with Lindstrøm's trademark brand of space dust. Formally, the work here is light years away from the proggier, more sprawling galaxies he's recently navigated; Christabelle's languid yet charismatic, definitive yet hazy vocals are given properly emphatic productions.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mirror Traffic
    His standard of work is so smart that the stupid parts come off refreshing, and even middle-range material like Mirror Traffic feels strikingly well-crafted.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Head
    Though the current incarnation of the Flaming Lips has been together since 2014, and thus responsible for these various digressions, the band has undertaken a sonic overhaul here that matches the emotional, sentimental tenor of Coyne and Steven Drozd’s new compositions.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    April
    The effect of all this quietness and patient exploration of song structure can be transcendent or it can be incredibly boring, and for both better and worse, April is more of the same.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Reckless
    The incarnation of the SteelDrivers as captured on Reckless has offered one of the year's strongest country records.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Formal Growth in the Desert
    There’s long been a political edge to Protomartyr’s doom-and-gloom art rock, and it’s heartening that the band continues to avoid sloganeering and boring moralism.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Emmaar
    With Emmaar, the band continues to construct a creative vision that remains true to the music of their native country while finding ways to incorporate more traditional North American blues elements.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    UGLY
    Despite its allusions to seeking therapy, listening to the album feels like accompanying a friend on a disastrous Saturday night bender.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Julia with Blue Jeans On
    The album puts Krug front and center, armed with nothing but piano and voice. It's a ballsy move, but it pays off in spades.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Thursday
    The Weeknd is in full command of his craft, and at this point it's almost impossible for me to imagine that he won't deliver on the finale. He's earned my trust, as would any other artist who had already released two of the year's best albums.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kill For Love
    Kill for Love is a great tribute to the grueling power of fatigue, an album that turns a dearth of ideas into a virtue.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pleasure
    Unafraid in her songwriting to lay bare her faults and flat-out embracing flaws in the album's jagged production. Pleasure isn't a perfect album, and that's the point.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    American Slang
    With American Slang, the Gaslight Anthem takes another step away from their riff-punk past, leaning more heavily on their classic-rock influences and letting their snotty, Warped Tour tendencies take more of a backseat than ever before.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    7
    Rock n’ roll is body music, and like the best electronic music, it aims for the gut. But even at their liveliest, the songs on 7 are designed for the head--a shot straight to the mind.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hey Hey My My Yo Yo
    Finally receiving distribution in the U.S., Junior Senior's Hey Hey My My Yo Yo sounds every bit as fresh and exuberant now as it first did in the summer of 2005.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hello Cruel World
    Peters has created an album of rare insight.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Le Noise
    Le Noise is the sound of a singer-songwriter playing to his strengths.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heaven Knows
    The album’s satisfying and detail-rich production choices, courtesy of co-producers like Greg Kurstin and Mura Masa, achieve a tonal cohesion throughout.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    From a Room, Vol. 2
    If anything, the album flows together even better than Volume 1, where the disparity between light-heartedness and heavier themes was an occasional distraction.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jim Noir
    Jim Noir works brilliantly on an escapist level, even though it rewards more active listening.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Outside Society: Looking Back 1975-2007
    For most of its runtime, Outside Society captures a time when Smith's music was as naïve, romantic, and unforced as her memoir, even if, by the end, the labored intensity of her poetry has prevailed.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    After Hours
    His most personal album to date.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Revolutions Per Minute
    This is brainy, energizing stuff, and sometimes (such as on "Just Begun," where Kweli trades sharp bars with J. Cole, Jay Electronica, and Mos Def over a beautiful sax loop), it hits like lightning.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Follow Me Down
    Traditionalists may bristle at the notion that they've lost yet another promising young talent to a more contemporary sound, but Follow Me Down proves that Jarosz has an intuitive grasp of traditional folk and bluegrass structures and a taste for more adventurous, modern song choices and arrangements.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Fictions
    It might just as easily be christened their most intimate, their most casual, and their most soulful. All of these superlatives are relative, of course; the album grows in stature and appeal with every spin, and distinguishes itself as an Elbow album not quite like any other.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Future Ruins
    The band flips the traditional lexical of their genre, emphasizing the spaces between the anthemic, quasi-pavlovian verse-chorus-verse structure that defines classic rock n’ roll. The band’s sixth album, Future Ruins, similarly thrives in the spaces between the power chords and choruses.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Sigh
    While the lyrics offer a precious few glimmers of defiance, Hackman’s production choices, featuring mostly instruments played by the musician herself, have the verve to suggest not only an artistic resurgence, but a personal one.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Triplicate
    His delivery is tender and delicate, his phrasing measured and sharp, and to the point that the voice cracks and flat notes that do inevitably arise seem by design, only adding to his emotional vulnerability. Acting as producer under his pseudonym Jack Frost, Dylan pristinely captures the subtle dynamics of his live touring band, adding only subdued horn charts by James Harper.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lady Killer
    The Lady Killer doesn't possess the stylistic ADHD or the rough edges of Green's earlier work, sticking to sprightly brass arrangements and cheery string licks as his weapons of choice for the most part.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tell Me How You Really Feel
    Barnett's sophomore effort is a striking manifestation of gnawing anxieties, both internal and external; it may lack some of the instant affability of 2015's Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, but that's by design.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Marissa Nadler
    Marissa Nadler still retains the ghostly inscrutability that has always kept the singer's insistent weepiness from sounding pathetic.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Transference
    The somber, subtle hand instills Transference with a fair amount of grace, an impressive feat for a band known more for its indie irreverence than its elegance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Maudlin Career
    Luckily, for both the album and its audience, the band's perseverance results in hits more often than misses.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hum
    On The Hum, this delicate balancing act between abrasive aggression and unfettered tunefulness positions Hookworms as an uncompromising experimental act with festival-sized ambitions, capable of synthesizing disparate and often contradictory sounds into a cohesive and compelling whole.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stay Gold
    Stay Gold, their third album, is less intimate than their previous effort, The Lion's Roar, but, backed by a 13-piece orchestra and gifted with a rare rapport and plangent voices, employed in close, modulated harmonies, the Söderbergs find their pitched balance in the melancholy and occasional loneliness of the quotidian.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Begin To Hope
    There's a fearless, uninhibited confidence to Spektor's voice, not to mention a delightful whimsy to her music, that sets her apart from artists like [Fiona] Apple.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Reflektor
    The band certainly hasn't left rock behind, but they've found a way to push beyond a sense of exhaustion with the resources that the genre has to offer, while at the same time reflecting on the tenuousness of interpersonal connection in an age of hyper-evolving technology.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    C'mon
    Whatever C'mon lacks in newness it more than compensates for in intimacy and richness.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jinx
    Though their sonic palate is monochromatic, their music is both cogent and engrossing. Jinx feels like a hallucination that proves hard to shake.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Greatest
    A stirring, raw masterpiece.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    White Chalk
    White Chalk, wholly self-contained and uncompromised, is a work of literary depth and complexity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mr. M
    Presenting musical and lyrical content in discrete halves, it functions as a microcosm of the kind of balance that makes Lambchop great, a poetic focus on words that doesn't scrimp on the music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    How Did I Find Myself Here?
    They're a little more mature, a little tighter, but just as virile, and definitely not just cashing in.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Green to Gold
    At times, the album’s lack of intensity allows the songs to sink into the background a little too easily. Sonically, they all have the same placid air about them, with few distinctive peaks or valleys. But even if the songs slide by effortlessly, this approach allows the Antlers to color in a moment without demanding too much attention. If and when you stop to really take these sweeping, solemn songs in, it’s clear that the Antlers are still capable of conjuring beauty.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hideous Bastard
    “Run the Credits” rejects the notion that life fits into a neat, three-act narrative, and Hideous Bastard serves as a frank, compelling chapter in Sim’s.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Keep It Hid
    Keep It Hid suggests just as strongly that Auerbach is able to stand as a compelling solo act.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Warp & Weft
    Warp & Weft is Veirs's most expansive effort yet, with obvious musical and thematic ties to experimental Americana.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sixth House
    It's a layered, engaging addition to one of indie-rock's most slept-on songbooks.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Midnight Organ Fight
    Hutchison and his bandmates reward patience as well as repeated listens, and they deserve credit for unearthing a unique chunk of the Scottish heart, raised on equal parts American punk and traditional folk and bleeding beautifully.
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