Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,113 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: 1,683 out of 3113
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3113
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3113
3113 music reviews
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    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Music from Big Pink [50th Anniversary]
    It's this funhouse-mirror approach to the past—backward-looking but never self-consciously “retro”—that makes Music from Big Pink feel truly timeless. This goes double for this anniversary edition, which features a revelatory new mix supervised by veteran engineer Bob Clearmountain. His work brings a feeling of presence to the album.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fetch the Bolt Cutters
    On a purely musical level, it’s a bold experiment in pop craft, a collection of songs on which Apple stretches her talents in adventurous new directions. ... Fetch the Bolt Cutters is Apple’s most timely—and timeless—effort yet.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    Tidy this album isn't, but like There's a Riot Goin' On or the distended jams of One Nation Under a Groove, the uncompromising messiness is the point. The focused and fervent anger, politics, cosmic knowledge, and above all unshakable self-doubt is the point too.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Black Messiah
    D'Angelo's assuredly delivered a great album, one that, even in these nascent days of our receiving it, already feels like something that's always been, that's necessary, and that was probably worth any wait.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
    The effort to canonize My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as one of hip-hop's all-time high points is already underway, and I'm confident that Kanye's new album can weather the backlash that all potential classics must confront.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Motomami
    In taking bits and fragments from both her previous work and that of her contemporaries, Rosalía has fashioned an album rife with the contradictory sounds, lyrical themes, and artistic impulses of the past and present.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life's Rich Pageant
    Life's Rich Pageant serves as both a guidepost for how R.E.M. moved in an arena-sized direction and as another extraordinary album in the band's uninterrupted run of true greatness that spanned between Murmur and Automatic for the People.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Live At Reading
    Reading is a far cry from pop-chart fodder. And while the jarring howl of Cobain's Fender and his gravelly delivery may alienate the more nonchalant corners of their fanbase, these ferocious renditions will be a godsend to the dyed-in-the-wool Nirvana following.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lemonade
    If Lemonade feels less ambitious than the near-70-minute Beyoncé, it's probably because the penetrating spoken-word interludes, composed of verses by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire, featured in Lemonade's accompanying long-form music video have been excised from the album itself.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
    Each orphan stands proudly on its own as the vestige of an old idea or a forgotten path—proving that even Waits's missteps still manage to point in the right direction.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    You Want It Darker
    You Want It Darker doesn’t just boast a broad sonic palette, but the return of a broad-minded pop sensibility to his work after a sustained period of asceticism, with a precise lyrical platform granted manifold meanings through differing musical approaches, the songs bolstered by Eastern rhythms, full-bodied organ lines, and choral chants.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Channel Orange
    Channel Orange is so textured, complex, and mature that Ocean's recent coming out feels like a footnote, rather than the entire story. It's a revelation that only further colors the tales of longing and disappointment found on this impressive album.
    • 92 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.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Live In London
    London is by far Cohen's most generous live release, and if it tilts too heavily to the last two decades of his career, it compensates by including virtually all of the classics from the first three.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Good Kid, M.A.A.D City
    Where Good Kid, M.A.A.D City really succeeds is in its powerful emotional core.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Renaissance
    Due in part to its tonal variety and expert sequencing, Renaissance never feels monotonous, despite its near-relentless forward motion.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The ArchAndroid
    As is, she's turned out a landmark debut that contains a full LP's worth of excellent songs and almost no bad ones, and she's done it entirely on her own highly idiosyncratic terms.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Guts
    Despite occasional missteps like that and “Pretty Isn’t Pretty,” which feels like a risk-averse treatise on an important issue, Guts is more consistent than Rodrigo’s debut. Her writing has gotten more precise, which makes both her self-criticism and frequent barbs hurled at others land all the better. She’s also writing with a knottier, less easily resolved perspective this time around.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    S.O.S.
    SOS’s playful approach to genre-swapping carries a defined sense of artistic freedom across its varied tracklist. Not every experiment is a success—the wispy alternative elements of “Ghost in the Machine,” chiefly its indietronica instrumentation and unnecessary Pheobe Bridgers guest spot, never really cohere—but the album doesn’t linger on any one specific style or mood for too long.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Illinois
    From its framing gimmick and its anti-folk folk songwriting to its he-has-to-be-kidding song titles and its show-offy instrumentation, Illinois should reduce to a simple stunt performance. That it's pop-art of the highest caliber, instead, cements Stevens as one of the most vital voices in music today.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Cities to Love
    Accept the slight strain of portentousness to this album, though, and you'll find a world-class rock band in as fine form as ever.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Punisher
    These songs simmer beautifully and quietly, eventually boiling over in intermittent moments of sonic boisterousness, and the results are often stunning.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    1989 (Taylor's Version)
    The album’s first half remains stronger overall, but it’s the latter half that more fully justifies the re-recording. The five new “From the Vault” tracks are all solid, though they don’t function as a true thematic and aesthetic extension of the album in the way that the additions to Red (Taylor’s Version) did.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
    The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We’s numerous emotional peaks, from “Star” to “My Love Mine All Mine,” are so moving that the listener may also be convinced that love is a light in a dark world, a pillar of fire in the wilderness. Indeed, Mitski’s ability to pack so many gut-punches and inspired ideas into half an hour remains uncannily impactful.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Faith: Special Edition
    Though the new booklet of liner notes includes an interview in which Michael admits that he was fully aware of and exploring his own identity as a gay man, the album itself now clearly hides more than it reveals.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty
    Freed from the aesthetic demands of an odd-couple partnership, Big Boi (Antwan Patton) improves on the standard set with 2003's Speakerboxxx, an ostensibly solo work crystallized inside a double-album set, delivering a record that's rigidly focused and almost uniformly strong.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Untrue
    Machine music this unrelentingly intimate is worth the attention it requires.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    the record
    Throughout The Record, Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker frequently return to the idea of an elusive search for identity. But they don’t seem to have found clarification just yet, failing to land on a collective identity or collaborative creative method that complements their myriad talents.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Z
    Dialing down the reverb and allowing more wide-ranging influences to show through, My Morning Jacket fashions a messy, transitory record that's head-over-heels giddy, curiously experimental, and patently weird in equal measure.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    Her guitar may be her primary tool for shaking up and complicating otherwise strictly defined songwriting, but Clark's voice remains the thing that defines her material, the glittering lynchpin of the glorious, ever-expanding world she's created.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Like a Rose
    For the rest of its admittedly brief running time, Like a Rose is a keenly observed and rewarding album that's a standout in what, only a few months in, has already been an uncommonly strong year for country music.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    RTJ2
    RTJ2 is the rare sequel that bests the beloved original in almost every facet.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Honey
    At nine lean but often seemingly formless tracks, Honey feels raw and incomplete, like a work in progress--and maybe that’s the point.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Modern Times
    Might be the most upbeat feel-bad album of 2006.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    That! Feels Good!
    What’s Your Pleasure? boasts a more sophisticated, diverse palette—including Italo, house, and funk—but its follow-up’s fluffier philosophy reflects Ware’s obvious elation at finally being able to bring her music to life in a club setting.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Rat Saw God
    All of the wobbling between tempos and styles might sound haphazard, but it’s executed with precision. And Hartzman’s snatches of Americana imagery—rain-rotted houses, parking lots, “piss-colored bright yellow Fanta”—ultimately cohere into an evocative portrait of the fringes of American life.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    LEGACY! LEGACY!
    Although the album explores intergenerational black trauma and joy, Woods’s personal insight into such experience functions as the album’s anchor and serves as a more accessible entry point.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    RTJ4
    Structurally inventive, lyrically deft, passionate and heartbroken, RTJ4 positions Run the Jewels as the laureates of our collapsing era.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Love You Jennifer B
    I Love You Jennifer B is filled with freewheeling musical pivots that confidently cover an ambitious amount of territory and find Ellery and Skye coming into their own as decisive talents.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All Mirrors
    All Mirrors is challenging and confrontational, and rewards close, present listening.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Got Heaven
    Mannequin Pussy offers an answer in their refusal to accept the status quo. Through a balance of firebrand punk and intoxicating power pop, I Got Heaven is a musical expression of self-governance and all the pain and pleasure that comes with it.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Order of Time
    A triumph of form, The Order of Time is through and through a completely idiosyncratic take on American roots music, steeped in its tradition but not beholden to it.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Chris
    Unlike most ephemeral pop music today, Chris--like the gender-fluid character at its center--feels consequential and everlasting.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tigers Blood
    The way Crutchfield’s crystalline voice penetrates her music’s often beautiful, serene instrumentation on Tigers Blood dovetails with her gutting truth-telling.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More than Ropes Will Ever Do
    The Idler Wheel captures what's made Apple one of the defining artists of her generation: a persona that's reflected changing views of private versus public spheres. The results have often been misunderstood, but Apple has continued to present herself as someone who refuses to resort to niceties of tact or self-censorship when she engages with her audience.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Merriweather Post Pavilion
    Soulful and almost structurally flawless (it's the most minor of complaints that the middle run of songs are all about a half-minute too long), Merriweather finds one of the most talented, most creative pop bands finally and gloriously figuring it all out.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bright Green Field
    Squid’s transformation into post-punk disruptors is indicative of a band that relentlessly bucks against their limits. To hear them ply their craft on Bright Green Field, the album represents a crystallization of that impulse.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Only God Was Above Us
    Only God Was Above Us is ultimately just another (very good) Vampire Weekend album rather than a radical shift. It essentially sees the band dressing up their patented medium-paced, occasionally frantic, symphonic rock in see-through disguises.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blómi
    Relative to the musician’s entire body of work, the album’s unflagging optimism and embrace of new age ambience are joyously therapeutic.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    folklore
    What makes Folklore such a compelling album, then, are the countless ways in which Swift, the savviest and most acutely self-conscious artist of her generation, anticipates questions surrounding her genre bona fides and leans into each apparent contradiction.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Valentine
    If Lush presented a snapshot of a particular mindset, a woman trapped in a psychological limbo, Valentine captures the blurry nature of an inquiry still in progress.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    American Band
    The band displays a new level of clear-eyed purpose and here-and-now urgency on American Band. Eloquently plainspoken as ever about the pressing issues we face as a nation, they’ve made an album multiple decades into their career that establishes them as more directly relevant than ever.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Future Nostalgia
    Occasionally, the album’s commitment to juxtaposition feels strained. ... At just 37 minutes, however, Future Nostalgia seems to understand that the best diversions are as fleeting as they are exhilarating, so we should enjoy them while we can.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    30
    On 30, she displays the confidence to share her boldest vocal, stylistic, and thematic interests.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bad as Me
    A raucous self-celebration, full of scrappy beat poetry leavened with dark-edged Americana influences, Nelson Algren-style urban malaise, and off-kilter, strangely instrumentalized songs.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Masseduction
    Clark's baroque musical sensibilities remain intact throughout Masseduction, but the increased tenderness of her vocal performances, coupled with more thematic emphasis on the push and pull of romantic relationships, offers a moving counterweight to St. Vincent's typically wry cultural commentary.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saint Cloud
    The songs here are at once deeply intimate and broadly accessible, like selections from an alternative universe where modern mainstream country radio isn’t all pandering, homogenized slop.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dear Science,
    TV on the Radio have finally made an album that someone other than hyper-analytical music critics might actually enjoy.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Return To Cookie Mountain
    TV On The Radio do more than keep pace with their Shortlist Prize-winning Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes; they enhance nearly every aspect of their debut, creating an album that is uniquely theirs in the modern scene.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Run the Jewels 3
    The level of discourse on Run the Jewels 3 may be higher than your standard hip-hop grandstanding, and the references may be current and the beats may be more intense, but the album remains too entrenched in the grammar of the past to ever feel entirely fresh.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990
    By showcasing an artistic fusion of the tranquil with the bustling, the primal with the technologically advanced, the compilation shows how much work has already been done to find ways of summarizing and celebrating the potential of this new reality.
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What Now
    Sonically, it’s a triumph, a delicately textured musical realm that begs to be luxuriated in. What’s missing is the same level of songwriting that elevated Howard’s previous work. There are a few standout tracks, but no burrowing hooks on the level of “Don’t Wanna Fight” or “Stay High.” The only time she comes close to those earlier songs is on the propulsive “Red Flags.”
    • 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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Letter to You
    Springsteen deserves credit for resisting the crowd-pleasing tug of this kind of album for so long that it feels like a warm homecoming rather than a retread. It’s only when Springsteen leans on the nostalgia with explicitly backward-facing lyrics that the album gets a bit too self-aware. ... The E Street Band proves that when they’re in their element—as they are on this album—they can elevate the Boss to his best.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Undun
    If it's not as immediately galvanizing as, say, Rising Down, it lingers.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jubilee
    While the emotions Zauner is sifting through across Jubilee’s 10 tracks are at once recognizable and powerfully vulnerable, they aren’t always easy to pin down. Zauner frequently crafts metaphors and imagines situations that are at times compellingly contradictory or unclear. ... The ambiguity gives the music a tantalizing quality, insistently throwing us off her trail.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Rainbows
    In Rainbows with the all-too-familiar stiff, programmed beats and strategically placed effects of '15 Steps,' but soon more organic elements (spare bass and leftfield guitar--literally, coming out of the left speaker) take center stage, rendering it one of the band's best hybrids in years.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    King's Disease III
    By adhering to a creative formula typically associated with many foundational Golden Era classics, King’s Disease III often feels like a spartan exercise in pure technical ability. ... We get 100% pure, raw, unfiltered Nas spitting over a variety of velvety soul samples and invigorating instrumentation, which is, more often than not, a pretty good thing.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Art Angels
    When it all clicks, it's a perfect pop moment. The worst that can be said of Art Angels is that its maximalist ambitions sometimes overshoot the needs of pop.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dawn FM
    Rather than looking outward or upward, though, Dawn FM is a woozy, psychedelic deep dive inside the artist’s famously twisted psyche.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness [Deluxe Edition]
    The songs from the Mellon Collie sessions speak not only to the quality of that abundance, but also to the Smashing Pumpkins' status as some of the most creative and successful purveyors of sensitive but cerebral art rock.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Past Is Still Alive
    Despite confronting such daunting themes as grief, addiction, and identity, The Past Is Still Alive rarely feels heavy. Much of this owes to Segarra’s reliably triumphant outlook in the face of adversity. .... Credit also goes to producer and co-engineer Brad Cook, who helps couch Segarra’s words in unfussy Americana that’s easy on the ear.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You
    Despite tracks that feel unfinished or experiments gone awry, Big Thief’s artistic vision is more diverse and fully realized on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You than on any of their past releases.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    You're Dead!
    While it may not be clear where we're headed throughout the album, Ellison maneuvers through the bedlam with such confidence that it's not just easy to get swept up in his grand vision of the Great Beyond, but to return for repeat visits.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Homegrown
    The album turns out to be missing link in Young’s catalog as much for Shakey’s emotional life as it is for his stylistic choices.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Complicated Game
    He's a storyteller with a literary knack for using detail and narrative to draw complex, relatable characters, and his storytelling finesse has never been more evident than it is here.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross
    Anohni’s charting of various cycles of decay and change have the weight and import of a Greek tragedy. It’s a pity, then, that so much of the music on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross underserves her anguished storytelling.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    i/o
    While the “Bright Side” mixes bring out the album’s more dynamic range, the lyrics lack the edge of Gabriel’s early music. The earnest perspectives of songs like “Love Can Heal” and “Live and Let Live” are apparent right from their titles, with the latter in particular succumbing to cliché. And the more subdued “Dark Side” mixes only highlight those flaws. i/o is heartfelt and meticulously crafted, but its impact is muted by its splintered presentation.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blue Lips
    Blue Lips epitomizes what a return to form should strive for: to serve as a reminder of past greatness, yes, but to also be a bold departure from what’s come before, embracing risks and pushing boundaries, even if it occasionally teeters on the edge of excess.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dirty Computer
    While the songs here are consistently hooky, they lack the earlier albums' sonic adventurousness.
    • 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.
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