Slant Magazine's Scores

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:
3117 music reviews
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sincerely, Future Pollution's contrast of bright synths with dark lyrics shows the band approaching their sound with refreshing irony. By filtering the seedier byproducts of our modern world through their gaudy yet gloomy lens, Timber Timbre reflects the hyperbole of an increasingly toxic culture.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marry Me isn't quite a religious experience, but it's unequivocally divine.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The album’s early singles “High in the Grass” and “Worry with You” both play off of Sleater-Kinney’s strengths, the former showing off the ever-expanding reach of Tucker’s voice and the latter sporting one of the band’s sneakily catchy hooks. On the other hand, songs like the dour “Tomorrow’s Grave” sound a little too familiar and fail to push the group beyond their previously established template.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lyrically, Goldfrapp occasionally leans too far into pop simplicity. ... Later in the album, though, when Goldfrapp gets more experimental—or at least dispenses with conventional pop structures—things begin to feel more immersive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The irreverent, snide wit and easy self-deprecation prove to be an effective, if surprising, fit for Tegan and Sara's brand of genial indie-pop, elevating Sainthood beyond mere snappy diversion.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Hot Chip boldly expand and louden up their sound significantly here, while admirably retaining full command of the forms they've already mastered.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Burton was a classical music aficionado, and was said to have introduced elements like harmony and sophistication into Metallica’s early no-frills thrash. S&M2 puts that influence on full display.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It’s a perfectly-balanced 36 minutes, and hopefully a foreshadow of more collaborations to come.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rather than wallow morosely, he uses death as the focal point for an expressive song cycle that takes in the whole realm of life, with darkness frequently felt but not always the dominant emotion.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tangk underpins its more personal and emotional lyrics with rich, layered arrangements. It’s in this delicate balance of sound and sentiment that the album finds its groove—not always in the heights it occasionally struggles to reach, but in its earnest exploration of love.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Even though the album's production aims for and achieves a vintage AM radio sound, Collett's willingness to subvert the conventions of songwriters like Dylan or Kristofferson makes Here a definitively modern record and perhaps the first of Collett's solo albums to sound like a real classic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Humor Risk isn't a perfect album by any stretch, but it does provide another striking glimpse into the picaresque, tongue-in-cheek tragedies that mark McCombs's unique songwriting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A left-of-center delight that will tide over the Rilo Kiley faithful until their next album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's a straight line from Pet Sounds to Pulp's Different Class, and while Stand Ins and its predecessor share R&B riffs affected with a country twang, connecting this latest dip in the Okkervil to a '90s Pulp-y-ness is a refreshing move.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The album’s greatest asset is its immediacy, with its best songs seemingly allowing De Souza to get things off of her chest after years of holding it all in. It’s a shame, then, that All of This Will End often also indulges indie-twee clichés.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Common's latest, Nobody's Smiling, centers on the war-torn streets of South Side, Chicago that Common left nearly two decades ago, a setting the 42-year-old rapper navigates like a hardened local. The album's best moments explore this tension, proving that despite Common's age and commercial success, he can figuratively inhabit Chiraq better than most of the city's rising stars.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The melodic hooks are huge, but what makes The Life Pursuit a legitimately great album is that Murdoch's lyrics are at turns witty, insightful, assertive, and sardonic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Despite the many highs, Relax is still a debut, and at times finds the group struggling with the specifics of their sound.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Though there are moments of frayed musical charm throughout Alvvays, including the irresistible crack in Rankin's voice during the final chorus of "Party Police" and the so-jangly-it-hurts arpeggios of "Atop a Cake," it exhibits an unexpected level of versatility for a debut.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    This is one of the things that makes I'm New Here such a masterfully stark album. The music is darker, more mechanical than the jazz-inflected backing he used in the '70s, he exhibits few of the tendencies of the genres he helped influence.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Duhks should only continue to build upon their reputation as one of the most compelling acts on the roots scene with World, which puts to rest any doubts as to how they would carry on with their new incarnation.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Loveless has offered another unqualified masterpiece with Sleepless Nights and reasserted her place as one of the premier artists not just of the country genre but of contemporary popular music.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ken
    The album is murky and claustrophobic but still consistently melodic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Estelle’s fifth studio album, Lovers Rock, both bottles the ardor of the eponymous reggae style and testifies to the force of a deep and resilient love.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Surrender Your Poppy Field proves he’s deepening rather than merely proliferating his music, continuing to grow up instead of growing old.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    While Monáe specializes in sprawling, ambitious concept albums, she’s often strongest in distilled form. And The Age of Pleasure sustains its energy in a way that her other, sometimes wildly variable albums have never quite managed.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The band’s ability to get to the heart of this change and create compelling songs from familiar scenes helps make Open Door Policy the best Hold Steady album in over a decade.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Matangi again establishes M.I.A. as one of the most fascinating figures in modern music, but the personal voice underlying her material remains aggravatingly half-baked.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The songs are often still a little too cute, too twee and self-satisfied, but they're just as catchy without the burden of self-reflexive exoticism.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There's a sketchbook quality to the album, a formlessness that it never quite escapes, nor seems to want to. But there are worse things to do, Halo knows, than to get lost in the clouds for a while.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frightened Rabbit has always relied quite heavily on its members' charm, and for the most part, Mixed Drinks preserves that beautifully.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    One hopes that the next LP will pack a little less filler, and Bright Eyes will drop a 40-minute work as tight as their best four-minute works.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Tucker and Brownstein deserve credit for continuing to take risks and experiment with Sleater-Kinney’s established sound, resulting in another solid effort in an unexpectedly fruitful late period.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    It is no small feat to write melodies as memorable as Berman's exceedingly quotable lyrics, but on each song here, he does. Lookout Mountain is an outstanding work of art.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fame Monster does provide some small, if fleeting, glimpses behind the pretense.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Diamond’s critique of online culture and its effects on our self-perception aren’t new. The crucial difference here is that she locates herself inside the machine, without claiming she can escape the traps she sings about. Diamond constructs a world of exaggerated femininity without drowning in irony.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Literate, perceptive, sometimes a tad mawkish, they're also resolutely sturdy, insightful diversions that would please even without the Biblical trappings.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    While The Golden Casket doesn’t match the heights attained by some of Modest Mouse’s earlier work, it’s their first album since 2000’s triumphant The Moon & Antarctica that doesn’t feel like it could benefit from some editing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Orton's assured hand throughout marks Comfort Of Strangers as a sturdy piece of songwriting that will stand among the more memorable albums of 2006 come year's end.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    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
    • 90 Critic Score
    Powerful and smart above all else, Enlightenment may just be Hubbard's finest record, and it's certainly the new decade's first essential album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The feverish approach lends Odd Blood a slithering lo-fi ecstasy, elevating it beyond the similarly buzzing, synth-infused efforts of Yeasayer's peers.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The New Pornographers may be sounding more and more like robots these days, but they remain uncommonly attuned to the preferences of the human ear.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble in Dreams is full of complex and sophisticated songs, so it's probably unfair to focus on one to the exclusion of others, but 'Shooting Rockets' deserves a little more attention, since it's the best evidence of the fact that, when it comes to proggy indie rock, Bejar's really in a league of his own right now.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    What’s left is Young’s preternatural gift for melody (most of this album’s songs started as hummable tunes that popped into his head on his daily walks), Crazy Horse’s enduring chemistry, Rubin’s less-is-more studio hand, and, of course, the most important subject there is: this old planet.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Omnion is polished, precise, and familiar-sounding, but it's also indelibly soulful. It recalls the discotheque's formative role as sweaty, secular alternative church.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ring is more a cohesive, narrative song cycle than a simple collection of disparate pop songs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blood Under the Bridge may not garner much critical attention, but it's both a roundly rewarding album and a quietly thrilling throwback.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank is a really good, if not necessarily phenomenal, rock record.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    While occasionally the duo seems to fall back on cranking up the merciless 4/4 kick until their audience begs for mercy, Alive 2007 actually does more to reveal their musicianship than almost any other Daft Punk release to date
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bathed in cloaking shadows, Night Music captures the macabre power of darkness, where ordinary shadows are stretched into ominous significance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Even as the album moves between sleepy, whispered gentility and brief outbreaks of shaking guitar noise, the sullen mood and expansive echoing textures make Dead in the Boot feel of a single piece.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    She doesn't lash out at external forces. Instead, she internalizes that dialogue, resulting in her most contemplative album to date.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Run Rabbit Run's ample highlights not only illustrate Osso's mastery of their string instruments but emphasize Stevens's incredible talent as a songwriter and arranger.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    That The Bride works best as a song cycle rather than a collection of pop hooks is a testament to its cohesion and intrinsic intertexuality, but what's missing here is Khan's knack for grafting avant-art-rock concepts onto mainstream forms.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The album succeeds by being both engaging on a intuitive level and deceptively thoughtful, putting aside overt ambition to pursue a condensed, often melancholy sound that retains TV on the Radio's characteristic inquisitive nature.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ships is very, very, very good, but it's not always enjoyable.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The lyrics are endearing in their quirky honesty (he quips of Sean Parker, an ex’s ex: “I think he started Spotify”). But backed by yet another sumptuous sonic tapestry—including finger-picked guitar and spacey sound effects—they sound like nothing less than Tasjan finally figuring out exactly who he is.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The arrangements are organic and lived in, and the distinct influences of each member of the band figure prominently in the album's overall style, making it far more than just a showcase for Tucker.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bish Bosch may sound a little strained at times, but it's still a big, ballsy achievement, the work of a committed artist delving further into a land of vaguely sketched nightmares.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In terms of personality and originality, Amerie's latest is on par with Solange's "Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams." As with that slept-on record, War is deserving of greater commercial impact than it is likely to earn.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    As a whole, A Blessing And A Curse is the album that Drive-By Truckers have always threatened to make, a hard-rocking testament to the intelligence, sensitivity, and soul of a people often discredited for lacking all three.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    With individual tracks that ebb and flow between emotional extremes, Everything is an album that has a definite sense of momentum for much of its running time, which it unfortunately loses in its home stretch.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Paired with Nagano's warm, engrossing voice, Ritual Union's songs become much more than just capable synth-pop fare.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Northern Lights captures the live show as circus, the aura where group participation and the raggedness of improvisation supersedes a faithful rendering of songs, an interpretation that, if not always satisfying to listen to, is at least fascinating to behold.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    [It may not be] the most ambitious or thematically cohesive album, but Guitar Slinger makes up for its lack of focus with some truly inspired songwriting and performances.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Like most sugary confections, Dom is a band best digested in quick, indiscriminate bursts.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Braids perform with a self-assured subtlety, lending their sophomore album a quiet, unassuming depth that far outstrips the flash of its predecessor.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In something of a seismic shift for the usually downcast artist, the constant of the songwriting here is a buoying faith in the power of love, and all the many forms it can take: romantic (“Love”), carnal (“Cherry”), platonic (“Coachella”), effusively adulatory (“Groupie Love”), fetishistic (“White Mustang”), and, yes, self-loving (“In My Feelings”).
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Recently, Beck too often sounds like he's playing with his toys and not intent on making actual music, but the new album's brief 10 tracks prove that he's almost always more interesting when he's not having fun.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The superior but occasionally milquetoast Crystal Castles: Book Two inadvertently underscores the pitfalls of maturity and liberation.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The album serves as a continued refinement of the talents that he displayed on 2006’s immense Harmony in Ultraviolet and 2016’s confrontational Love Streams, even if it’s ultimately not as consistent. Its atmosphere is so suffocating that “Anxiety” may accurately sum up most listeners’ emotional states after listening to the album in full—and considering No Highs’s ambitions, that’s perhaps the highest possible praise one could bestow upon it.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Though it's only to be considered "pop" in the most obscure sense, and it goes to show Albarn has a pretty warped concept of the term, Plastic Beach provides the almighty shakeup that pop music has needed for some time.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The album is an assemblage of smart, new wave-tinged garage-rock tunes, less a labor of love than a near-effortless studio session between two post-punk revival veterans that might have been recorded in the space of a few afternoons.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Judged as an expansion on Kozelek's craft, Admiral Fell Promises is a slight effort; it offers intimate perspective, sure, but the object of observation remains the same.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There's always been a relentless optimism hidden behind the Flaming Lips' unique brand of pop experimentalism.... Which makes their understated 13th album, The Terror, an evocation of a bleak, post-apocalyptic future, such a striking contrast.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What makes Hello Young Lovers a more interesting album than many pop purists might give it credit for is how Sparks' anti-pop approach to song structure and instrumentation give their compositions both a weight and a replay value that they wouldn't otherwise have.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Will's coup is how it keeps one guessing, and how Barwick keeps from relying on the beautiful yet impersonal sonic washes of her past work. It's the sound an artist, whose mysterious and celebrated process has ironically created theatrical and curated work to this point, finally achieving subtlety.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nada Surf have matured into a strong enough band to make an album like Lucky, which is full of such existential hand-wringing and one of the year's first great pop records.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The pleasure isn't in the gimmick or the dress-up, but in the disciplined play of emotion behind them.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    There's definitely a smart-dumbness to what Shining does here: International Blackjazz Society sounds like Nine Inch Nails circa “The Hand That Feeds,” with an earnest deployment of such dinosaur vulgarities as cowbells, hard-boogie keyboards, and shout-along choruses.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    While the grooves are solid, there are few truly memorable riffs or solos to speak of on 72 Seasons. Even when the band does manage to recall the trappings of their early days, as on the thrillingly breakneck “Lux Æterna” or the Iron Maiden-style “Room of Mirrors,” the arrangements generally lack the intricacy and dynamics of their classic albums. ... This is more than made up for, though, by James Hetfield’s vocal performances.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At his most direct, he fully holds his own against the likes of [Ryan] Adams or Ron Sexsmith, and for his compositional skill, Idols Of Exile is perhaps a more consistent album than either of those two has released.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The band's songs are formally simple but always smart, loud but neat. Nothing on Root for Ruin stretches much past four minutes in length; the album fits in with its predecessors in this respect, and if it feels slighter than Les Savy Fav's best work, it's only by dint of its faithful similarity to that earlier material
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Alicia is at once her most accessible and forward-minded album in years.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In its ambitious attempts to revive conscious rap and push the envelope sonically, Attention Deficit may be one of the best rap releases of the year even while it lacks the focus of a central persona.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    W.A.R. is Monch's blockbuster, a marathon sci-fi tale set in some grisly faraway cacotopia.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fortunately DOOM is unable to completely shake off his own best and worst habits, and so Born Like This contains its fair share of the rapper's classic screwball set pieces.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's one of those rare albums that manages to borrow just enough from its well-treaded sources to avoid charges of outright theft. That isn't to say that the band delivers anything truly new here, but they manage to present a paved-over musical tradition in a way we're not quite used to hearing.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Despite its no-frills approach, Trying Hartz works solidly, presenting a satisfying microcosm of one of the world's most inventive and ridiculous bands.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In what has been a truly dreadful year for country music, Chief is a surprise standout.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's never quite a tour de force, but as a union of the Orb's heady roots with their spiritual ascendants' minimalist ethos, the album is a consistently satisfying groove machine, and a worthy entry to the upper ranks of the Orb canon.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    While 2016's Not the Actual Events explores dissociative identities and 2017's Add Violence brims with paranoia about our increasingly simulated reality, Bad Witch moves past such insular anxieties and more directly acknowledges that society's chaos is the result of our collective hubris. ... Reznor conveys a bleaker and more visceral sense of desperation on the album's two instrumental tracks.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Most of Jesus Piece’s experimental tendencies are confined to intros and outros on …So Unknown. The album feels more defined by genre than the band’s past work. But there’s no denying that the anger running through it is contagious, and creates a stark contrast to the majority of recent pop-rock, which carries a mood of depressed resignation.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Every song on Volta sounds like it was birthed in no fewer than 10 months, if not five years. "Fun" hardly has an opportunity to enter the picture when Björk's now seemingly permanent fastidiousness remains her métier.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Unsurprisingly, the album sounds best when it goes for broke; the more looped, harmonizing Krausses and miniature guitar solos, the better.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ultimately, Grossi's ability to marry elements of electro-pop, soul, classical, gospel, and other divergent influences into a cohesive, lo-fi brew allows You Are All I See to succeed as an evolutionary step beyond Active Child's synth-drenched origins.