Slant Magazine's Scores

For 3,106 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:
3106 music reviews
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    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
    In many ways, Wilson updates his style, while still paying tribute to the things he loves.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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 is a striking, dynamic album, and will deservedly land on many year-end lists.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    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
    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 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
    An astonishing piece of work.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    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 is one of the year's fresher efforts and future classics.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    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
    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
    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
    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
    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 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
    Cunniff has never sounded more joyful as a singer or writer as she does here.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    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 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
    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
    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
    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.