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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Caught In The Trees
    The simplicity of Jurado's writing is matched with a tender tone and a lack of condescension.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fox Confessor Brings The Flood
    The 12 most ambitious, dense songs she's yet committed to record.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rough and Rowdy Ways
    As with his best work, Rough and Rowdy Ways encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster that can be clearly discerned but rarely summarized in the most turbulent of ages.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    W.A.R. (We Are Renegades)
    W.A.R. is Monch's blockbuster, a marathon sci-fi tale set in some grisly faraway cacotopia.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Fordlandia
    In the end, the album is a fascinating musical thesis that can function with or without its brain intact.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wounded Rhymes
    Wounded Rhymes is filled with gorgeously spiteful moments such as these, adding an obstinate wrinkle to the album's already-rich, shadowy mystique.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Help Us Stranger
    Help Us Stranger is another compelling exhibit in the band’s continuing quest to prove that there’s still more to be mined from the supposedly anachronistic guitar-rock template. Almost every track here is another example of one that would never have reached the same heights without the contributions of each band member.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Swing Lo Magellan
    Wild, wooly, and willfully chaotic.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Gathering
    It's as diverse as anything Ritter's done yet also focused in its exploration of joy, sorrow, and their strange intermingling. It's proof enough that Ritter is one of the true keepers of the American folk lineage--a proud traditionalist and an utter original.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Made a Place
    Oldham’s albums as Bonnie “Prince” Billy always achieve a cohesiveness that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts, and I Made a Place is no exception.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Devotion
    Devotion includes all of the same essential ingredients as its predecessor, but a ratcheting-up of intensity makes this album shine even brighter.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Microcastle
    In putting the brakes on their revolutionary impulses to instead embrace old tropes and familiar sounds, Deerhunter has hit upon an endearing, awesome universality.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit
    The result is that, in both content and form, The 400 Unit is an unapologetically Southern album, and the lived-in authenticity of its performances, masterful songwriting, and fierce intelligence also make it one of the finest albums of what has already been a strong year for popular music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Warp & Weft
    Warp & Weft is Veirs's most expansive effort yet, with obvious musical and thematic ties to experimental Americana.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    DAMN.
    Clocking in at under an hour, the new album maintains its predecessor's varied sonic palette with a mishmash of stark trap flourishes and woozy, impressionistic melodies but also distills these sounds to an ear-wormy directness primed for your car speakers.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II
    Fundamentally, though, the album is a wistful and occasionally melancholic one that is as consistently captivating in its lyrical content as it is wonderfully dark and eerily melodic in its composition and production.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Modern Times
    Might be the most upbeat feel-bad album of 2006.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Helplessness Blues
    Helplessness Blues succeeds because Fleet Foxes find a way to consistently balance the added level of nuance with their natural inclinations toward epic songcraft.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Like to Keep Myself in Pain
    A deeply rewarding album.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Productive Cough
    Despite the clean production and largely decreased noise level, A Productive Cough is Titus Andronicus's freshest, wildest, most unexpected work to date.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    That Lucky Old Sun
    In many ways, Wilson updates his style, while still paying tribute to the things he loves.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Modern Vampires of the City
    The songs may be dense and literary, but they're also immediately potent on a purely visceral level, striking a perfect balance that makes for what's perhaps the best album in a year already thick with great material.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Teen Dream
    Beach House makes it easy on Teen Dream, supplying an intense but transparent sheen of iridescent sound, marking an album whose quality is almost instantly evident. Better than anything in recent memory, the album typifies the difference between sonic interference as an instrumental tool and a blanket to hide beneath.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Heartland
    Pallett has crafted an absorbing gem of a record, one that delivers substantial emotional payloads by means of incredibly intricate pop music.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All Fiction
    Their unwillingness to resort to cheap pop gestures stands out in an era where few acts even bother to cloak their crass commercialism. But above all stands the music, and All Fiction—the title of which is a reference to our culture’s increasingly fractured ideas of what constitutes truth—marks yet another extraordinary entry in the band’s discography.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ghosteen
    Ellis and Cave create an ambient field where all of the ambiguities of grief and hope can exist at once.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Home Video
    Ultimately, it’s less the nuances of Dacus’s writing than her willingness to expose herself and her past so freely—even the most difficult parts—that make the strongest impression on Home Video.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Expert in a Dying Field
    The group’s third album, Expert in Dying Field, is an exhilarating power-pop tour de force, replete with bristling guitar riffs and bright, infectious harmonies. It’s also a devastating exploration of anxiety, insecurity, and regret—a reflection of how, in life, there can be no true joy without sadness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dungeonesse
    The group's music is far more pointed and focused when she's standing at its center, proving that it's not just the parts (polished and hummable though they may be), but Wasner's transformative presence that ultimately sets Dungeonesse apart from the rest of the '90s-mining pack.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Two Dancers
    Two Dancers is a striking, dynamic album, and will deservedly land on many year-end lists.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sweet Warrior
    The tightness of Thompson's compositions grounds the explosive, whimsical meandering of his improvs; Sweet Warrior, and "Guns Are The Tongues" in particular, captures that glory as well as anything else from this century.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Actor
    Her voice seems small and fragile, but it's her most effective instrument, and it affixes a tight lynchpin to the album's broadly creative themes, leaving it glistening with ghostly elegance.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Chemistry Of Common Life
    Chemistry is a natural and seamless masterpiece that might never have happened but for the band's own need to thumb its nose at expectations.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Children Running Through
    An astonishing piece of work.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Arm's Way
    As a fully realized, bombastically confident artistic statement, Arm's Way is Nick Thorburn's "69 Love Songs." Hereafter we will only seek to understand him according to his own pop- and violence-addled logic, mapped perfectly on this thrilling album.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Food & Liquor
    Food & Liquor is one of the year's fresher efforts and future classics.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Proof of Youth
    Every fade-in and chord change on Proof of Youth is perfectly calibrated to make for seamless song-to-song transitions and for an album that seems to end entirely too quickly.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit
    For an album that deals in low stakes, Sometimes I Sit and Think finds Barnett hitting some incredible highs. Without sounding labored, she creates an impeccably honest world rife with humor, self-deprecation, and heartbreak.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Scene Of The Crime
    Scene of the Crime is as comprehensive and as thorough an artistic declaration of self as any in recent memory.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Negro Swan
    It's this ability to capture both sides with equal commitment--the struggle and the resistance through self-love--that makes Negro Swan Hynes's most assured, accomplished, and significant album to date.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Magic Position
    The Magic Position is a euphoric listening experience not even being a critic can spoil.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Go
    Even if the era of Sigur Ros is indeed over, Jonsi's solo career contains all the exhilarating promise that a new beginning should.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    City Beach
    Cunniff has never sounded more joyful as a singer or writer as she does here.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Most Normal
    Aside from sludge rock veterans like Cherubs or fellow experimentalists like Lightning Bolt, it’s hard to think of another act capable of creating such daringly deranged slabs of noise.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    High Violet
    High Violet is an expertly handled balancing of the airy and the dense, and nowhere is that better exemplified than on the triumphant "England."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    World Record
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wavering Radiant
    Whether trading in power chords or atmospheric overlays, the band excels at transforming emotions into thrilling sounds, palpable awe, and tangible dread. This is metal played at its arresting best.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Need to Feel Your Love
    It’s just as intense in terms of either volume or passion as their self-released EPs, but the album’s somewhat surprising emotional and stylistic eclecticism prevent the band’s library of overcharged ’70s-style riffs or its maximalist energy, epitomized by singer Tina Halladay’s wailing typhoon of a voice, from becoming too fatiguing.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Brothers
    An album that works as both a blisteringly smart genre study that combines classic and contemporary perspectives on blues, soul, and R&B and as just one hell of a rock record, Brothers reaffirms that the Black Keys belong in any serious conversation about America's finest bands.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    How Do You Love?
    Throughout, these songs depict human connection in all its messy glory, making the case that the glory is worth the mess.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Celebration Rock
    Celebration Rock is a tipsy toast to the very best moments in life.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    If The Age of Adz harnessed Stevens's limpid melodies to crashing electronica, Carrie & Lowell finds that electronic experimentation sublimated, emerging primarily in the album's timing, which, like a click track, is more precise and mechanical than anything on Stevens's purely folk efforts.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wolfmother
    One of the stronger debuts of 2006.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    While it may not be Cave's most accessible album, owing both to the experimental nature of much of the music and the fact that its level of emotional rawness makes it a legitimately uncomfortable listen in places, it may very well be his best.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ghost to a Ghost/Gutter Town
    Williams made some pretty great records during his tenure at Curb, but Ghost to a Ghost/Gutter Town suggests that he's only just begun to showcase his apparently boundless creativity and breadth of his artistic vision.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Take Care
    On Take Care, Drake finally shows he's got the talent to match the hype.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Some People Have Real Problems
    Some People is stuffed to the rafters with love songs but they're never precious or cloying, even when the arrangements soar to rousing string/brass/choir-laden climaxes, or when the lyrics are comprised of little more than a string of clichés .
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tell Me How You Really Feel
    Barnett's sophomore effort is a striking manifestation of gnawing anxieties, both internal and external; it may lack some of the instant affability of 2015's Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, but that's by design.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Bachelor
    The Bachelor's overall tone reflects a nihilistic view of both romance and humanity, making for an about-face from the relative sunshine of 2007's "The Magic Position," and this tone is reflected in some of Wolf's most ambitious, baroque compositions to date.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Okemah And The Melody Of Riot
    Okemah is heady stuff, to be sure, but it's also one of the year's best straight-up rock albums.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let England Shake
    Let England Shake borrows precepts from all over the singer's canon, specifically extrapolating the piano-based concepts of White Chalk into louder, fuller renderings.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    People, Hell and Angels
    People, Hell and Angels offers the clearest sense yet of how Hendrix was preparing an evolution of his own.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Appetite for Destruction: Super Deluxe Edition [Box Set]
    Its hours of bonus content do offer a fresh perspective on one of the last great rock albums of the pre-alternative era. That material--including a handful of B-sides, previously unreleased demos, and most of the 1988 EP G N' R Lies (more on that later)--is the set's chief selling point.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Singles
    As a whole feels like a more complete and satisfying journey than either of Goldfrapp's last two albums, progressing confidently from crushing guitar-driven boogie to weightless space pop.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Critterland
    Challenging, startling, and deeply powerful, this rallying closer confirms what the previous nine songs already suggested: that Carlisle is a singular artist and that Critterland is a worthy addition to the canon of country-folk classics.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Distant Relatives
    It feels almost vain to describe individual tracks, because every last note on Distant Relatives blends to form a seamless, cohesive whole.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Illusory Walls
    When the album’s key thematic line appears toward the end of the song—“The objects we’re locked in, immobile and violent/Just fewer like that, fewer afraid”—it feels like the awakening that the band has been building toward all along.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood
    The world Cale has created here is conflicted and weird, but it's also fascinating.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Melodrama
    Whether it's a party record disguised as a breakup album or a breakup album disguised as a party record, it's cathartic, dramatic, and everything else you could want an album titled Melodrama to be.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Moon Shaped Pool
    While A Moon Shaped Pool offers little in the way of new sonic territory, its newly naked and incisive portrayal of emotional vulnerability remains a resoundingly major achievement.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lady Killer
    The Lady Killer doesn't possess the stylistic ADHD or the rough edges of Green's earlier work, sticking to sprightly brass arrangements and cheery string licks as his weapons of choice for the most part.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Centralia
    Centralia is the most sophisticated and cultivated Mountains album to date.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Push the Sky Away
    In Push the Sky Away, an album of thrilling darkness pierced by moments of brilliant light, Cave may have crafted his defining statement.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Avalanche: Outtakes & Extras From The Illinois Album
    The more interesting discussion to be had about The Avalanche is whether it says more about Sufjan Stevens or everyone else that a collection of even his second-tier material ranks among the most superior releases of the year.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yuck
    Their self-titled debut is a 12-track, 45-minute workout, and it so effectively hits you warm in the gut with distortion and stick-to-your-ribs melodies that you won't just wish you were 20 again; you'll realize there's no subscribed age qualification for that wonderful feeling you get while listening to this record.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    La La Land
    Not only does the band’s output remain as inexhaustible and freewheeling as ever, the album stands as some of their best late-career work.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Lemonheads
    The Lemonheads is nearly as great as the band's masterpiece, It's A Shame About Ray, and far more dependable than the runner-up Come On Feel The Lemonheads. And it may be more fun than either.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Beware and Be Grateful
    A singular experience and one of the best albums of the year so far.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Magdalene
    The album is a knotty meditation on the process of separating self-perception from public perception, and of twigs’s reclamation of her body and work as hers and hers alone.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Red (Taylor's Version)
    While the two versions of “All Too Well” are the most obvious examples of that skill, it’s the editing over the entirety of Red that elevates it from an album that seemed destined to be remembered as a transitional work in Swift’s catalog into a confident, refined album that demands inclusion in the pop canon.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life is Good
    What makes Life Is Good stand out is what also made his celebrated debut, Illmatic, so compelling. There's a sense of narrative unity here, a wide-angle look of the artist as a grown man.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Blessing And A Curse
    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
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Life Pursuit
    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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Let's Get Out Of This Country
    While the songs are undeniably beautiful and even fun, the music provides a vital balance to the album's substantial thematic heft, and it's that combination that makes Let's Get Out Of This Country one of the year's best pop albums.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Am Very Far
    Fans who approach I Am Very Far carrying expectations informed by the group's earlier releases will no doubt find this to be Okkervil River's most challenging work to date, but it's also the group's most grandiose, thrilling, and brilliant.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blame The Vain
    Represents a new peak in a career full of them.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    COWBOY CARTER
    It’s an album of Americana not in the banal, produced-by-Dave Cobb sense, but in the truest senses of narrative and musical form.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    No Color
    Moving forward without the assistance of contributing vibraphonist Keaton Snyder, No Color is especially drum-heavy, and Kroeber's unconventional style works toward forming a repartee between the group's two members, who converse in a style that at times resembles jazz musicians.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Introduction
    An effortless triumph that should appeal to Red Krayola fans and newcomers alike.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Deacon
    On Deacon, Wise continues to prove how insightful he is at weaving his romantic obsessions with painfully honest, emotional expressions of his personal fuck-ups. Only this time his songs are more earthbound, grounded in the secular rather than the celestial.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fur & Gold
    Bat for Lashes' music feels like some lost specter that has fortuitously wandered into your home and can't help but haunt you.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Real Emotional Trash
    The joy of listening to Malkmus's songs has always been the involvement the listener takes in separating the "truth" from the "spoof" (much like with other oddball geniuses like Robyn Hitchcock or Tom Waits). There's plenty of both here, but more importantly, there's enough interplay between the two to keep things interesting and delightful.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Carried To Dust
    While most groups lasting over 10 years tend to run on artistic fumes, Joey Burns and John Convertino gush with unbridled creative enthusiasm here.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It's Blitz
    Sure, it's easy to lament how fangless they sound here, with just hints of the skuzzy basement ferocity that has made Fever to Tell one of the decade's most enduring records. But the finesse they display here, on their most mature and stylistically coherent record, may ultimately serve them even better.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bon Iver
    For much of Bon Iver, Vernon takes his cues from Volcano Choir, using an array of disparate instrumentation and looping effects to beautifully eerie effect.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Don't Live Here Anymore
    Though the War on Drugs may take a slightly more straightforward approach on I Don’t Live Here Anymore than they have in the past, they still find new ways to engage with complex arrangements. The result is a nimble balancing act of accessible pop-rock anthems and experimental soundscapes.
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