Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
For 3,119 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: 1,689 out of 3119
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3119
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3119
3119 music reviews
view
per page
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    An American Trilogy: Looks Like Rain/'Frisco Mabel Joy/Heaven Help The Child
    Looks Like Rain, 'Frisco Mabel Joy, and Heaven Help the Child are still fascinating documents--not quite Nashville, not quite pop, not exactly experimental. Newbury literally created his own artistic place that's simultaneously familiar and unclassifiable.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1989 (Taylor's Version)
    The album’s first half remains stronger overall, but it’s the latter half that more fully justifies the re-recording. The five new “From the Vault” tracks are all solid, though they don’t function as a true thematic and aesthetic extension of the album in the way that the additions to Red (Taylor’s Version) did.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We’s numerous emotional peaks, from “Star” to “My Love Mine All Mine,” are so moving that the listener may also be convinced that love is a light in a dark world, a pillar of fire in the wilderness. Indeed, Mitski’s ability to pack so many gut-punches and inspired ideas into half an hour remains uncannily impactful.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Faith: Special Edition
    Though the new booklet of liner notes includes an interview in which Michael admits that he was fully aware of and exploring his own identity as a gay man, the album itself now clearly hides more than it reveals.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
    Freed from the aesthetic demands of an odd-couple partnership, Big Boi (Antwan Patton) improves on the standard set with 2003's Speakerboxxx, an ostensibly solo work crystallized inside a double-album set, delivering a record that's rigidly focused and almost uniformly strong.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Untrue
    Machine music this unrelentingly intimate is worth the attention it requires.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Z
    Dialing down the reverb and allowing more wide-ranging influences to show through, My Morning Jacket fashions a messy, transitory record that's head-over-heels giddy, curiously experimental, and patently weird in equal measure.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    Her guitar may be her primary tool for shaking up and complicating otherwise strictly defined songwriting, but Clark's voice remains the thing that defines her material, the glittering lynchpin of the glorious, ever-expanding world she's created.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like a Rose
    For the rest of its admittedly brief running time, Like a Rose is a keenly observed and rewarding album that's a standout in what, only a few months in, has already been an uncommonly strong year for country music.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    RTJ2
    RTJ2 is the rare sequel that bests the beloved original in almost every facet.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honey
    At nine lean but often seemingly formless tracks, Honey feels raw and incomplete, like a work in progress--and maybe that’s the point.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Modern Times
    Might be the most upbeat feel-bad album of 2006.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    That! Feels Good!
    What’s Your Pleasure? boasts a more sophisticated, diverse palette—including Italo, house, and funk—but its follow-up’s fluffier philosophy reflects Ware’s obvious elation at finally being able to bring her music to life in a club setting.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rat Saw God
    All of the wobbling between tempos and styles might sound haphazard, but it’s executed with precision. And Hartzman’s snatches of Americana imagery—rain-rotted houses, parking lots, “piss-colored bright yellow Fanta”—ultimately cohere into an evocative portrait of the fringes of American life.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LEGACY! LEGACY!
    Although the album explores intergenerational black trauma and joy, Woods’s personal insight into such experience functions as the album’s anchor and serves as a more accessible entry point.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    RTJ4
    Structurally inventive, lyrically deft, passionate and heartbroken, RTJ4 positions Run the Jewels as the laureates of our collapsing era.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Love You Jennifer B
    I Love You Jennifer B is filled with freewheeling musical pivots that confidently cover an ambitious amount of territory and find Ellery and Skye coming into their own as decisive talents.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All Mirrors
    All Mirrors is challenging and confrontational, and rewards close, present listening.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Got Heaven
    Mannequin Pussy offers an answer in their refusal to accept the status quo. Through a balance of firebrand punk and intoxicating power pop, I Got Heaven is a musical expression of self-governance and all the pain and pleasure that comes with it.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Order of Time
    A triumph of form, The Order of Time is through and through a completely idiosyncratic take on American roots music, steeped in its tradition but not beholden to it.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chris
    Unlike most ephemeral pop music today, Chris--like the gender-fluid character at its center--feels consequential and everlasting.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tigers Blood
    The way Crutchfield’s crystalline voice penetrates her music’s often beautiful, serene instrumentation on Tigers Blood dovetails with her gutting truth-telling.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
    The Idler Wheel captures what's made Apple one of the defining artists of her generation: a persona that's reflected changing views of private versus public spheres. The results have often been misunderstood, but Apple has continued to present herself as someone who refuses to resort to niceties of tact or self-censorship when she engages with her audience.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Merriweather Post Pavilion
    Soulful and almost structurally flawless (it's the most minor of complaints that the middle run of songs are all about a half-minute too long), Merriweather finds one of the most talented, most creative pop bands finally and gloriously figuring it all out.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bright Green Field
    Squid’s transformation into post-punk disruptors is indicative of a band that relentlessly bucks against their limits. To hear them ply their craft on Bright Green Field, the album represents a crystallization of that impulse.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All Born Screaming
    The album finds Clark at her most fragile and ferocious, seeking beauty among the waste and wreckage of 21st-century life. Itself a beautifully ugly thing, All Born Screaming is a visceral examination of art and nature when both are pushed to the brink.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blómi
    Relative to the musician’s entire body of work, the album’s unflagging optimism and embrace of new age ambience are joyously therapeutic.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    folklore
    What makes Folklore such a compelling album, then, are the countless ways in which Swift, the savviest and most acutely self-conscious artist of her generation, anticipates questions surrounding her genre bona fides and leans into each apparent contradiction.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Valentine
    If Lush presented a snapshot of a particular mindset, a woman trapped in a psychological limbo, Valentine captures the blurry nature of an inquiry still in progress.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    American Band
    The band displays a new level of clear-eyed purpose and here-and-now urgency on American Band. Eloquently plainspoken as ever about the pressing issues we face as a nation, they’ve made an album multiple decades into their career that establishes them as more directly relevant than ever.
Page: