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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electric Dirt
    The songs are new but have the worn familiarity of something pulled from storage, all the trilling organs and honky-tonk shuffles, made thinner and more poignant by the passage of time.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flower Boy
    If “maturity” isn't quite the word for Flower Boy, however, the album is nevertheless a significant milestone. This is easily Tyler's most emotionally risky, and rewarding, work to date--and, in its own way, more transgressive than anything from Odd Future's punk-rap peak.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Echo
    At just under 30 minutes long, the Portland-based singer-songwriter’s 11th album is more concise than it is confessional, but Veirs imbues her lyrics with vivid imagery and gentle humor that trade misery for escapism.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ballad of Darren
    While The Ballad of Darren may be an emotional journey, it lacks a proper conclusion—though that’s likely by design.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Apollo Kids
    Much like Raekwon on his 2009 landmark, Ghostface manages to steal the show despite the esteemed roll of guest spots. His rapid-fire delivery and blitz of sassy metaphors set a high-octane pace.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Something to Give Each Other
    What Something to Give Each Other lacks in poignancy, though, is made up for by the joy with which it embraces queer pleasure.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is Happening
    As good as this record is (and it is often very good), LCD Soundsystem can do, and has done, much better.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Once Twice Melody
    Beach House’s hymn to the grandeur of relationships is, perhaps, the most musically diverse and thematically mature project the duo has released to date—an emphatic affirmation of life’s joys and sorrows.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Treats
    Even though it's as ambitious an exercise in freeform genre-splicing and pure, amp-blowing volume as has been attempted in the past few years, it's always at least as fun as it is smart, taking the three great pillars of guilty-pleasure music (deafening arena-rock swagger, sugary pop hooks, and delirious dance beats) and rolling them together into a singularly appealing cacophony.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Trouble Will Find Me
    So while Trouble Will Find Me remains well crafted and satisfying, there's something inherently stultifying about it as well.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hell On Heels
    None of this would work if the songs weren't actually good, but they're frequently brilliant.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sugar Mountain: Live At Canterbury House 1968
    Sugar Mountain is less impressive than Massey Hall but it offers more insight, catching Young at a peak of undiscovered exuberance, sharing loose stories between songs, strumming aimlessly and joking with the crowd.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fall Be Kind [EP]
    Thus, when not overextending the disappointing, unfinished musical projects on Fall Be Kind's, the Collective are busy beating their promising ideas into monotony.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Bitch
    An intimate existential chronicle of imprisonment and liberation, its visceral, blood-smeared intensity works off a steady heartbeat of acute artistic ferment, the roiling passion underlying Hval's powerful declaration of self.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Feels
    Feels fails to come together as a coherent whole.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Down to Believing
    The taut and engaging first half of Down to Believing juxtaposes formidable country-rock like "I Lost My Crystal Ball" and the garage-rock-at-heart "Tear Me Apart" against more poised and controlled expressions of emotional unrest.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014
    Even if Wilco is in danger of running out of interesting new places to take their sound, it's only because, as Alpha Mike Foxtrot is a convincing testament to, they've spent the last 20 years taking it to so many places already.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Yeezus
    From a production perspective, it's a smash. The beats remain head-spinning. But 'Ye's lyrics feel lazy rather than merely drawled, and he's seeking social-commentary cred that he hasn't earned--a posture that can't help but grate.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wildheart
    D'Angelo may have struck a new gold standard for intellectual R&B, and even recorded a more traditionally cohesive and satisfying album, but Miguel's cocktail of furious angst, pained perplexity, and damaged tenderness is just as relevant, acknowledging the complicated realities of modern sexuality while pushing to expand its horizons.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What's Your Pleasure?
    What’s Your Pleasure? is an album that, just a few months ago, might have felt like a nostalgia trip or a guilty pleasure, but now feels like manna for the soul.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Takk...
    As music that's beautiful simply for the sake of being beautiful, Takk… is an unqualified success.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics
    Adrian Younge Presents is intermittently thrilling, taking familiar genre signifiers and scrambling them within a less rigid context, but also eventually formulaic in a different way, setting a fixed eccentric template and largely sticking to it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    MCII
    This is an album that exudes playfulness, treating genre as something that's malleable and isn't afraid to poke open wounds if it means creating a piece of art that connects emotionally.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Serpent & the Sphere
    The album's preference for atmosphere over hooks, plus the paucity and snarling incomprehensibility of its vocals, makes it ideal for pondering whatever mystery that captures one's fancy. But it also has a clear point of view.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    It's a tribute to Case's ever-growing strength as a songwriter that she refuses to take the sharp edges off the vicissitudes her songs depict while still acknowledging the humor and occasional beauty of those edges.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burn Your Fire for No Witness
    Burn Your Fire for No Witness is noisier, brasher, and more confident than its languid predecessor.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Invasion of Privacy
    Cardi climbed her way up from the bottom, and Invasion of Privacy is a soundtrack for anyone who dreams of doing the same.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
    Johnson and the small army of country stars he's enlisted to collaborate on the project all wisely keep the focus on Cochran's extraordinary songwriting, making for an album that highlights the depth and range of Cochran's catalogue and the monumental influence his writing has had on country music.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ANIMA
    Anima still achieves a sonic and thematic through line. The album’s juxtaposition of lyrical techno-dread with austere, ghostly electronic music is satisfyingly unsettling. The lyrics are evocative in their economy, and rather than feel like guide tracks, the arrangements feel more fully realized than on Yorke’s past albums.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sparkle Hard
    Malkmus has been prone to juxtaposing tasteful pop songs with classic-rock elements and offbeat lyrics since Slanted and Enchanted, and the audible delight he still takes in such musical mischief is apparent throughout Sparkle Hard.
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