Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,120 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: 1,690 out of 3120
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3120
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3120
3120 music reviews
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    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    College Dropout
    Like every hip-hop album (even the great ones), Kanye West's The College Dropout is marred by too many guest artists, too many interludes, and just too many songs period. (I challenge every hip-hop artist working today to record just one album with 12 tracks or less-no skits, no guests, no filler.)
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twin Fantasy
    With its tight and at times almost arena-sized arrangements and clean--though not slick--production, the new version of the album, subtitled Face to Face, jettisons that entire aspect of the Twin Fantasy experience. For some who may have had trouble finding an entry point to the songs through the original album's lo-fi haze, this will be good news.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blackstar
    The way the lyrics alternate between ambiguous introspection and dark whimsy can also confuse the sense of the album as a whole, but hunting for patterns or for humanity on Blackstar is less the point than enjoying the majesty of David Bowie, even on the verge of his death, sounding this incredibly alive.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Something More Than Free
    Isbell's follow-up, Something More Than Free, retains Southeastern's intimate acoustic-based feel and heavyhearted lyrical matter, but it's even more smooth-edged and lacks the emotional gut-punches of its predecessor.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    M B V
    A few twists and turns shy of perfection, m b v is the innovation and sonic warmth of My Bloody Valentine rekindled and made anew.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Woman
    While My Woman may not be as powerful as Burn Your Fire for No Witness, it draws its strength from its creator’s sheer temerity to so drastically change course.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Javelin
    These contrasts—between the intimate and the grand, the divine and the natural—dovetails with what Stevens has always done best as a songwriter: bridging the universal and the personal. Javelin doesn’t just feel like a return to form—it feels resurgent.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blonde
    What results is a subtle study in duality, anchored by a single overt guest appearance--Andre 3000’s prickly, gymnastic verse on “Solo (Reprise)”--that, like an abstract of the album in miniature, manically splits off in a dozen topical directions at once.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
    Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is ultimately a rock record more than it is an ideas record, but on both counts the Seeds bring it like a band half their age.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bright Future
    With Bright Future, Lenker stands on the confidence of her talent, complemented by production choices that neither distract nor detract from the emotion of her songwriting.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Too Bright
    Nothing here sounds revolutionary or even especially distinctive, but Hadreas has successfully conceived of a new context for his raw lyrical approach, opting for a jagged, complex collection of bedroom pop over another sparsely appointed set of torch songs.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
    Though rose-colored, its sentiments don’t feel cheap because Mering’s buttery vibrato and earnest vocal performance ably convey the necessity of accepting a lack of assurance about the future while embracing temporary comfort.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Seer
    A raucous, thrilling beast, a hectic palimpsest of brutal noise and gentle ambience, with dueling sounds caught in an ongoing battle for control.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tigermending
    Round and Burns rarely keep their focus fixed on any one aspect of the album's narratives, arrangements, or performances for very long, and it's that constant sense of movement that makes Tigermending feel so wonderfully alive.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sundial
    Tracks like “Balloons” and “Afro Futurism” feature some of the fiercest political critiques and nimbly performed rapping of Warner’s career. Her delivery is poised yet casual, her charmingly nasal voice full of weariness and vulnerability.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Love You, Honeybear
    It's a rare fulfillment of outsized ambition and a crystallization of Tillman's inimitable narrative verve, however unreliable his narrator may be.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Be the Cowboy
    Only three of the album's 14 tracks exceed two-and-a-half minutes, but Mitski manages to pack so much into those scant running times that they play more like miniature suites.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    xx
    It's a perfectly executed ending for an album whose understated pleasures will surely amount to one of the year's most treasured releases.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let Me Do One More
    As a whole, Let Me Do One More is more punk than its predecessor, and like Australian punk-rockers Amyl and the Sniffers, Tudzin weaves the personal with the political and—in a way that’s as clever as it is uncomfortable—economics with love.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Random Access Memories
    RAM is an album that ultimately comes off having more respect for its spiritual predecessors than its listeners.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Neon Bible
    The music of Neon Bible is rarely anything less than uplifting. What the songs fail to do, though, is provide any real payoff to all of that uplift and passion.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Norman Fucking Rockwell!
    Distilled to their barest elements, the songs on this album reveal themselves not to be hollow vessels for vapid self-absorption, but frank assessments of the psychic effects of a world spiraling into chaos. ... She’s made an album with the unfettered focus and scope worthy of her lofty repute.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Annie Up
    If Annie Up doesn't quite break the country genre's familiar format, it's a hell of a lot of fun, and one could do worse than spend 40 minutes with these sassy almost-outlaws.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Suburbs
    Three years later, they've given us The Suburbs, a stunningly accomplished album about embattled, often embittered, adulthood by a band that continues to mythologize childhood even as it moves decisively into artistic maturity.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Children Running Through
    An astonishing piece of work.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kala
    M.I.A., undoubtedly the truest "outsider" to emerge on the pop landscape in ages, has crafted an album that, in its best moments, positions her as an impassioned advocate for the disenfranchised.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hit Parade
    If Hit Parade isn’t Murphy’s best album, it’s certainly her wildest and weirdest.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LIFE ON EARTH
    The album takes the listener on a journey—one that’s as satisfying as it is because Hurray for the Riff Raff covers so much new musical territory with such self-assuredness, from guitar-heavy indie rock (“Pointed at the Sun”) to folk-punk (“Rhododendron”) to hip-hop (“Precious Cargo”). Indeed, with Life on Earth, they’ve achieved something truly enviable: a fresh start.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    22, A Million
    The cracks, breaks, and flaws in Vernon's voice allow his humanity to shine through a little more. By saying less and embracing fragility, He sounds more vulnerable than ever.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Part Lies Part Heart Part Truth Part Garbage: 1982-2011
    The 40 tracks collected here are arranged more or less chronologically, which makes enough sense for a best-of set, and are divided almost perfectly evenly between the three eras of R.E.M.'s career, a choice that actively dilutes the quality of the album.
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