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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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    National Ransom
    Costello is a seasoned lyricist, clearly a very smart man, and his prose throughout National Ransom is a lustrous testament to that.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Prisoner
    Prisoner is also one of Adams's most sonically artful albums to date.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    First Two Pages of Frankenstein
    Occasionally, such stylings verge on the generically anthemic on First Two Pages of Frankenstein. ... The songs here are otherwise richly stacked with detail and sonic shadings.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lungs
    Florence's music is particularly sensitive to studio gloss; her singing is a fine balance between elegance and frenzy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shape Shift with Me
    Against Me! has returned with something truly personal, an album that has the nerve to be small.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Reminder
    Though jangly uptempo ditties are nothing new for the Canadian singer-songwriter, it's these kinds of songs, seemingly constructed for radio play, that mar the otherwise radiant Reminder.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heroes & Thieves
    The material in general isn't exactly what you'd expect from an artist who left the nest in search of creative freedom and appreciation, making Heroes & Thieves somewhat less rewarding than her last album.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Agnostic Hymns & Stoner Fables
    Agnostic Hymns impresses just as much for its tunefulness and Snider and producer Eric McConnell's unconventional choices as for its arch point of view.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Supernature
    Supernature picks up where its disco-pop predecessor left off, augmenting the remaining traces of Felt Mountain's ambience... with swathes of glam-rock and stabs of tinny new wave.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dedicated
    Dedicated, is a carefully calibrated attempt at brand extension, reprising the effervescent pop of her last two albums while at the same time acknowledging that the 33-year-old is now a full-grown woman. For the most part, Jepsen succeeds at threading that needle.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Coming Back To You
    That her backup occasionally lets her down, though, ultimately speaks to how confident Doolittle sounds here. Coming Back to You is an impressive opening salvo--even without the "for an American Idol" qualifier.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shapeshifting
    The result is Young Galaxy's third album, Shapeshifting, which retains the band's new wave and synth-pop influences while also dabbling in both more electronic and more earthly sounds and textures, frequently inhabiting the same tropical-pop terrain of bands like Vampire Weekend and jj.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alternate/Endings
    Alternate/Endings succeeds in leaving you both exhausted and anxious for more.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Soldier Of Love
    Apart from the futuristic sound of the title track and a mini-tribute to Michael Jackson on "Skin," Soldier possesses the same timeless quality as any of the band's previous albums.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    100 Days, 100 Nights
    100 Days, 100 Nights still speaks to the soul and the depth of the genre's past.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Life Without Sound
    By focusing less on inner tribulations and looking at the broader context of his place in the world, Baldi’s typical impulsivity and urgency of a frenzied youth transforms into the deliberateness of a wiser and more seasoned songwriter.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dedicated to Bobby Jameson
    Like the rest of Pink's catalogue, the hooks here can be elusive, buried amid a cornucopia of silly voices, hyperactive genre pastiche, and murky production values. But when they land, they land hard. ... It's that roughness around the edges that makes Dedicated to Bobby Jameson so deeply resonating.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Woman
    If a woman were singing the songs on Woman, it would make for a great neo-soul album. The fact that a man is performing them elevates the album, making it one of the most confident debuts in recent memory.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Days Are Gone
    Because the surface is so smooth, it takes a listen or two to discover how little depth lies beneath it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Endless Arcade
    If Teenage Fanclub’s songs are stylistically derivative, the melodies consistently stand up to those of the band’s progenitors.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Flood
    Flood sees Donnelly stretching into new sonic territory and refining the at times jagged indie rock of her promising debut. While there aren’t any songs here as immediate or infectious as “Tricks” or “Lunch,” or ones as lyrically potent as “Mosquito,” Donnelly’s growth as a musician reveals her to be more versatile than her past releases let on.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Joy'All
    Joy’All’s tone is light, even flippant at times. After a scant 10 tracks and barely 30 minutes, you might be left wanting a deeper exploration of some of Lewis’s more complicated feelings about this new phase of her life.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Okovi
    Danilova's music is often at its best when her powerful voice complements the gloomy arrangements rather than towers over them.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Crows
    With her songwriting on point (she's always had a weakness for obvious, forced rhymes, but her discovery of slant and blank rhyme leave just a couple such offenders intact) and with her distinctive contralto in exquisite form, Moorer's performance here is arguably a career best.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One Life Stand
    The frenzied interludes which sneak-attacked numerous songs on Made in the Dark have been banished, making way for a smooth, sleek, and splendid pop record.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter
    In many ways, the album plays out as a far more effective and far less deliberately post-modern survey of the multiple phases of Dylan's career than does Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There" or its accompanying soundtrack.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wincing The Night Away
    If the album isn't quite up to the lofty standards of their earlier work, it isn't off by much, meaning that Wincing The Night Away gives 2007 its first great pop record.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sukierae
    Cumulatively, it feels like there are just a few too many leftovers. It speaks to Tweedy's skill and experience as a songwriter that what is essentially the aural equivalent of him spending 72 minutes of quiet time with his family doesn't get boring sooner.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Loveliest Time
    Albums like The Loveliest Time are deliberately fragmentary, meant to fill in the pieces of her discography, and in that sense, this one is a wild success.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The List
    The List still pulls off a rare feat: It's a covers album that stands as an essential addition to an artist's catalogue.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gloss Drop
    Battles is, first and foremost, an instrumental group, but the tracks on Gloss Drop that do feature a guest vocalist are the undisputable highlights.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Years Of Refusal
    As the album proceeds, Morrissey simply sounds like a superior version of the singer he's always been.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Preoccupations
    Preoccupations, by design, neither grips nor pays off with the same level of gleeful improvisational intensity [as 2015's Viet Cong].
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tales From Turnpike House
    A modest triumph.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Popular Songs
    That these experiments hit their mark is a testament to how shrewdly Yo La Tengo has crafted their aesthetic over the years: They know exactly how hard and in what direction to push.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Loneliest Time
    With The Loneliest Time, Jepsen strikes a delicate balance.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lover
    Some pop stars may be too big too fail. Swift’s songwriting suffers from occasional bromides, and Lover can feel both overthought and, at a lengthy 18 tracks, under-edited. But Swift’s well-earned reputation for over-sharing, reflective of the generation for which she’s become a spiritual envoy, coupled with her newfound egalitarianism makes her not just a compelling pop figure, but an essential one.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Here and Nowhere Else
    It's all part of the sizable growth demonstrated on Here and Nowhere Else, which more than anything is defined by the sound of raw energy giving way to coherence and control.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pure Heroine
    The nihilist pop of Pure Heroine makes a strong case for the less-is-more maxim. What's left is a remarkably unpretentious and almost raw set of vignettes mostly powered by Lorde's modest, affectation-free performances.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Below The Branches
    Rates among the best releases of early 2006.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Color
    Moving forward without the assistance of contributing vibraphonist Keaton Snyder, No Color is especially drum-heavy, and Kroeber's unconventional style works toward forming a repartee between the group's two members, who converse in a style that at times resembles jazz musicians.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Cerulean Salt
    This is an album of unlikely dichotomies: of confidence and vulnerability, of yearning and forgetting, and of the simultaneous danger and attractiveness of self-destruction.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Every Loser
    Despite a few clumsy moments, Every Loser proves that Pop not only has more to say, but continues to find exciting ways to say them.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Healing Is a Miracle
    Healing Is a Miracle can sometimes be so delicate as to be weightless, and the music’s accumulation of details and small shifts in tone makes it more interesting in theory than practice. Even still, the album overcomes its slightness thanks to its willingness to dabble in different textures.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Because Of The Times
    However admirable and surprising the band's ambition throughout Because Of The Times may be, not every experiment works so well.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Bird
    Chambers just gets structure, and it's that know-how that makes Little Bird one of her finest albums.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mount Wittenberg Orca [EP]
    Within the narrow confines of the EP, that uneasy balance between hopelessness and guarded optimism is given voice through the blend of Dirty Projectors's bouncing vocal harmonies (the gratingly forthright "eh-eh-eh-eh" verses in "On and Ever Onward") and Björk's reliably magenta undertones (and yes, I do mean "magenta" in the Blanche Devereaux sense).
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Guider
    Guider may be a little jagged around the edges, but it's that one-take immediacy that gives the record its legs. Observing this brand of ultra-violence is thrilling, but the action can be a bit messy at times.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Accelerate
    If it isn't able to recapture the post-punk energy of "Reckoning," the political fury of "Life's Rich Pageant," or the epic scope of "Automatic for the People," the album, at the very least, finds the band playing to its strengths rather than attempting to explore an increasingly thin artistic mythology. That alone justifies Accelerate's positive buzz, even if the album doesn't quite support the magnitude of it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jump Rope Gazers
    Songs like “Dying to Believe” and “Out of Sight” keep this energy going, with drummer Tristan Deck and bassist Benjamin Sinclair maintaining a brisk rhythm section as Stokes and Jonathan Pearce’s guitars shimmer, groove, and ignite in equal measure. But the Beths are, perhaps, at their best when they’re at their breeziest.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night Time, My Time
    Night Time, My Time might just be the sort of gaunt, darkly painted neurosis needed to combat popular music's deluge of silly and crude self-affirmations.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big To-Do
    The Big To-Do suffers from the opposite problem, with its workmanlike consistency belying its lack of truly astonishing highs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ultraviolet
    With Ultraviolet, Kylesa has once again established themselves in the great tradition of hard-rockers who've realized it's possible to make a "dark" album without sacrificing accessibility, further proving that heavy riffs and great hooks aren't mutually exclusive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All I Intended To Be
    From her choices of collaborators and material to her extraordinary singing, Intended proves that Harris's greatest gift is her dead-on instincts.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love Is Not Pop
    This is pop with a light touch and a tremendously heavy heart; it only qualifies as easy listening if you can distance yourself from Assbring's expressive singing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Take Care
    On Take Care, Drake finally shows he's got the talent to match the hype.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Country Music
    It's the spectacular collection of songs as much as Burnett's ace production and Nelson's first-rate performances that elevates Country Music above the recent spate of country covers records and makes the album an essential addition to Nelson's rich catalogue.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Mount Zoomer
    With At Mount Zoomer, Wolf Parade has quite easily surpassed the greatness that was their debut, and have very quietly made one of the better albums of 2008.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Surprise
    What is startling about Simon's latest solo effort is how fresh and alive it sounds.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Home Before Dark
    The result is an album of the kind of sophisticated pop that proves that such exemplary songcraft should always be relevant.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Haunted Man
    While the album's comparatively restrained arrangements occasionally wilt in the face of Khan's fierce melodrama, The Haunted Man is still a worthy, often gorgeous entry in the Bat for Lashes canon.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In the Morse Code of Brake Lights
    It doesn’t sound like one of Newman’s more intimate, acoustic-focused solo albums, exactly—too many orchestral flourishes, hyperactive keyboards, and Case showcases for that—but at least half of it feels more like A.C. Newman & Friends than any of the band’s previous efforts.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Spade
    The Spade is a riotous album that recalls '80s-era Springsteen and Mellencamp, and Walker is smart enough to know not to take any of it too seriously.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Ear Park
    Songs begin lethargically and the vocals and instruments grope at each other, struggling to agree on how to establish the rhythm. Once they coalesce, each blooms, but the tracks refuse to linger in the thrall of the climax.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seventh Tree
    Seventh Tree is most compelling for the way in which the band's regained austerity and naturalism contrasts with their more recent hedonism.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spirituals
    Her least celebratory album to date, Spirituals is nonetheless ornate and often frenetic, managing to give her pent-up anxiety a kind of release.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twelve Reasons to Die
    The most arresting of Twelve Reasons to Die's many pleasures is how out of time the album feels: Its pointed narrative distance from straight-faced gangster rap is very 2013, but the simple virtuosity of the small moments smacks of eras in both rap and soul that passed long before Ghost ever stepped to a mic.
    • 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
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diamond Eyes
    When Diamond Eyes isn't trying quite so hard to be a great record, though, it ends up being a pretty good one.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Better Than This
    No Better Than This works as well as it does because it plays to Mellencamp's strengths. His genuine empathy for rural living and his occasional hell-raising both come through in equal measure.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Chronicles of Marnia
    The Chronicles of Marnia is her most accessible effort to date.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carried To Dust
    While most groups lasting over 10 years tend to run on artistic fumes, Joey Burns and John Convertino gush with unbridled creative enthusiasm here.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Work
    It’s a shame that his first album in over half a decade doesn’t push his musical ideas a little further, and in some moments, The Work feels almost like an addendum to 2016’s Good Luck and Do Your Best, but the results are still undeniably affecting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clear Pond Road
    Like Hersh herself, the album resists convention and refuses to be pinned down.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Saint Dymphna
    Yet as compared to their previous efforts, the album is surprisingly accessible and at times almost poppy-a valiant attempt at distilling, or translating, the Gang Gang Dance experience into the album format.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eternally Even
    Eternally Even is the sound of a road-worn artist, whose music normally channels the awe and splendor of his country, challenging its structure and finding the deepest valley he's ever seen.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Animals
    Rather than cutting and pasting samples and calling it a day, he skillfully weaves them together with improvisational live instrumentation. With Animals, analog and electronic, and past and present, are placed in an engaging dialogue.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Atlas
    If Real Estate captured the essence of summer, and Days maintained an unmistakably autumnal aura, then Atlas, the most thematically mature of the three, could easily be classified as Real Estate's wintery opus.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deeper Well
    But if the album’s unwaveringly restrained instrumentation holds it back from ranking alongside Musgraves’s best work, it’s still a welcome shift away from the country pop of 2018’s Golden Hour.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The True False Identity
    As he routinely does with other artists' material, Burnett has outdone himself on the album's production; it's the material itself that's a bit underwhelming.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fordlandia
    In the end, the album is a fascinating musical thesis that can function with or without its brain intact.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Saturday Night
    American stands as perhaps the most consistent set of material Paisley has committed to record.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Silver Gymnasium
    Ostensibly about a specific time and place, The Silver Gymnasium confirms Okkervil River as a band that's still too crafty to settle for anything so simple as a straightforward paean to childhood, using this boilerplate structure to examine the deeper meaning behind the natural impulse to fixate on the past.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kamaal The Abstract
    With Kamaal, one of hip-hop's finest has once again redefined his game--and upped the ante for the whole hip-hop genre in the process.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sun
    A collection of songs that represent a dynamic snapshot of the singer-songwriter in steady command of her craft while still occasionally giving way to passages of thin-skinned, deeply revealing storytelling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Swimming
    Swimming captures Miller at a creative apex where he's acutely aware of where he's been and where he can go.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sremm 4 Life
    Perhaps the album could have felt a tad more engaging if it attempted to do a little more both sonically and lyrically, but Slim and Swae, as well as longtime producer Mike-Will-Made-It, know exactly what they excel at and they do an excellent job at doing just that.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hackney Diamonds
    As high-energy and catchy as most of Hackney Diamonds is, though, the album also showcases a few tracks that suggest that the Stones might be better off embracing their age rather than asserting their eternal youthfulness (“I’m too old for dying and too young to lose,” Jagger declares on “Depending on You”).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bad Self Portraits
    Bigger, louder, and more eclectic works well on Bad Self Portraits, but smaller, quieter, and more precise was what made the band's earlier efforts so distinctive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sex And Gasoline
    Still, even at its most strident, Sex and Gasoline is topical and fiercely intelligent in a way that few modern country albums are.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Better Oblivion Community Center
    The songs on Better Oblivion Community Center are contemplative rather than declarative, granting the artists a chance to approach sorrow in a cheekier manner and find reserves of hope amid the wreckage.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paranoïa, Angels, True Love
    What follows is a collection of wiry, introspective songs that break from pop conventions while asserting the life-affirming power of love.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sisterworld
    For Liars, it's another triumph of stylized strangeness--and the third consecutive album on which they've proven themselves to be one of the most creative and compelling acts in the musical underground.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    St. Peter & 57th St. [Live]
    St. Peter & 57th St. shows the current Preservation Hall lineup in a flattering light--that is, as exponents of a musical sensibility not so much trapped in amber as preserved via community.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Post Tropical
    Post Tropical succeeds in proving that music is often at its most compelling when it can't be compared or reduced to much of anything at all.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Total Life Forever
    Like its perfectly integrated packaging, Total Life Forever is successful because of attention paid to the things around it, a combination of direct influence and creative rigor that makes for a stirring experience.
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