Slant Magazine's Scores

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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
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    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Raven
    No matter the tempo or setting, though, Raven is fully aware of how the body can both entrap and liberate. It’s an innovative use of music as a vessel to capture both.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cosmogramma
    The surprising achievement of Cosmogramma is how capably it reinterprets that kind of innately communal vibe into private introspection without losing a bit of its energy along the way.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Close Ties
    The album is a reckoning with his own prickly memory, and it's a bounty of weathered emotion and hard-won wisdom.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Koi No Yokan
    Taken as both a culmination and a sign of more good things to come, it further solidifies the band's status as far and away the most long-lasting and consistent act of the maligned subgenre from which they came.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shields
    Pretty but formless, Shields plays like a calculated retreat into something altogether indistinct and inconsequential.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LP1
    LP1 is more than just a confident debut album. It's primordial in a way that Björk herself has often attempted but frequently short-circuited letting her cognizance get in the way.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stone Rollin'
    R&B's menu has never looked so diverse or enticing, but Stone Rollin' is overcooked comfort food dressed up as haute cuisine.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    With a Hammer
    But for each jagged, dissonant song that Yaeji hurls into the mix, there’s a smoother, more melodic counterpart, showcasing the artist’s intuitive sense of balance. The album’s more straightforward tracks, like “For Granted” and “Done (Let’s Get It),” serve as a testament to Yaeji’s ability to craft infectious hooks without sacrificing her distinctive experimental edge.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Soul of a Woman
    The loving details with which she and her band fill these songs transcend the same R&B clichés they reinforce.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Harps And Angels
    If Harps and Angels occasionally seems uneven, it's because Newman is still so daring. If it seems occasionally classic, it's because he's still so insightful and startlingly good at writing songs.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Present Tense
    Present Tense possesses a complexity that's not so calculated, focusing on the passage of music rather than layer upon layer of sound. Its 11 synth-drenched tracks are more bare than those on Smother, but they move much more fluidly, their liquiform seduction establishing a contrast with the band's ominous lyrics.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Boxer
    Boxer works best as a mood piece; it's also the first National release to work as a whole, and it's the best album I've heard so far this year.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Dream
    As far as reunion albums by aging bands go, this one is about as gratifyingly unpredictable as anyone could have hoped for. American Dream is notably more rock-oriented than its predecessors.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    We Will Always Love You
    These songs are more akin to paintings: Samples comprise skeletal underpaintings to which mind-bending Moog passages and the human voice give shape, texture, and weight. This time around, things are more akin to Tame Impala’s Currents, than the Beastie Boys’s Paul’s Boutique, though “Take Care in Your Dreaming,” one of the album’s few hip-hop-inflected cuts, is especially mesmerizing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Far In
    Exemplifying the album’s lo-fi aesthetic, these songs juxtapose staccato beats and watery synths, highlighting Lange’s knack for constructing minimally psychedelic but seductively melodic soundscapes.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    David Comes To Life
    David Comes to Life contains plenty of evidence that Fucked Up is still one of the strangest and most inventive guitar rock bands on the planet.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8
    While the album undoubtedly brings more than a few great moments, what is most disappointing is that instead of celebrating the past two decades of Dylan's career, it calls the idea of such a celebration into question.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lost In the Dream
    Granduciel is clearly still drawn to his rock roots, but as the gap between him and those influences widens, it become suffused with anxiety and dread, the sort of existential ambivalence that Lost in the Dream masterfully conveys with its vast distorted spaces.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Happier than Ever
    The album also nudges Eilish beyond the trip-hop and trap sounds that dominated her past work, resulting in a more sonically diverse set that allows the singer—whose downbeat vocals have often been compared to Lorde’s—to explore the more textured, melodic aspects of her voice.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Poison Season
    What makes Poison Season a great album, though, is that it doesn't completely wallow in Bejar's newfound smoking-jacket-and-fine-brandy sophistication—as opposed to the tattered-plaid-shirt-and-fifth-of-Jack wildness of early Destroyer. Rather, refined balladry like "Solace's Bride" coexists comfortably next to upbeat, funky songs like "Midnight Meet the Rain," which sounds like the badass theme song for an '80s cop show.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sick!
    Despite its scattered tone and occasionally underwhelming performances, though, Sick! is an important reminder of Earl’s skills as a poet of despair who’s unafraid to mine his own struggles in order to make sense of what’s happening around him.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Shaking the Habitual
    Of the album's 90-odd minutes (emphasis on odd), Shaking the Habitual features maybe 16 or 17 that fall into place within a canon that also includes the rubbery robo-funk of "Heartbeats" and the atmospheric devastation of "Silent Shout," though in most cases those minutes are buried inside much longer songs, consigning anything remotely hooky into the realm of affectation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Lucifer on the Sofa
    Spoon has hit something of a dead end with Lucifer on the Sofa. The album gestures toward breaking free of old habits, but it doesn’t present any new ones, musically or otherwise.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    BLACKsummers'night
    Upon first blush, there isn't much to chew on in BLACKsummers'night. Upon second pass, the absences become haunting.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rook
    While Shearwater has always been album-oriented (they've been known in the past, like Okkervil River, for their themed albums) Rook is by far their most successful to date.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
    Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers can be emotionally ugly and unpleasant, but it never feels less than completely authentic to Lamar’s personal journey. It’s thankfully levied with glimpses of joy and melodic hooks.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    50 Words for Snow
    50 Words for Snow is a success not only because it's so challengingly bold and peculiar, but because it repackages Bush's usual idiosyncrasies in an entirely new form.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    12
    Unlike albums such as David Bowie’s Blackstar or Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Skeleton Tree, both of which confront death head-on, 12 is decidedly more reserved in its reckoning with human impermanence. Yet, even if it’s less forceful in its execution, Sakamoto’s poetic, metaphysical approach—a paradoxically delicate yet fearless plunge into the unknown—is equally as daunting and devastating.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
    The 12 most ambitious, dense songs she's yet committed to record.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Third
    There's enough on Third (spaghetti-western guitars, organs, barking effects) to sate those who pine for the late '90s, but gone is the turntable scratching, ostensibly deemed too much of a relic from that decade; in its place are more electronic flourishes, like the cyclic synth-bass loop that softens the second half of "The Rip," a song which is proof positive that Goldfrapp would never exist without Portishead.
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