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
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 1,687 out of 3117
-
Mixed: 1,319 out of 3117
-
Negative: 111 out of 3117
3117
music
reviews
-
- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jul 27, 2021
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
In putting the brakes on their revolutionary impulses to instead embrace old tropes and familiar sounds, Deerhunter has hit upon an endearing, awesome universality.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Crack-Up takes contrasting musical ideas and textures and makes them functional, if not transcendent. Ultimately, though, the album fails to shed much light on the mind of an artist more preoccupied with shrouding his songs in crashing waves, shadow, and smoke.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jun 14, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album's lyrics, however, can't match this same level of musical precision, and Granduciel too often repeats the same vague sentiments using threadbare imagery.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 10, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album is hampered by Eno’s overly didactic messaging. His pensively exhortative lyrics work fine within their specific contexts, where the songs themselves lean into the existential terror that their pessimistic worldviews provide. But on more delicate offerings, like “Icarus or Blériot” and “Sherry,” the songwriting feels counterintuitive to Eno’s elegant musicianship, becoming an obtrusive supplementary element.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 14, 2022
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Even the most dance-oriented songs on Bradshaw’s second studio album, Svengali, are mellower than his past efforts, especially his two Muvaland EPs. The album also brings a new conceptual focus to his work.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 2, 2022
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
One does eventually feel the album’s length, with the stretch of songs in between “You Left Your Soul with You” and “I Am Easy to Find” feeling comparatively pedestrian—the sounds of a band treading more familiar ground before really staring to take chances. But once they do, the sprawl quickly begins to justify itself, revealing some of the most ambitious music the National has ever made.- Slant Magazine
- Posted May 14, 2019
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While it might not be the discovery of a new talent, it's certainly the deepening of an existing one—another in a long line of female pop stars initially given limited creative and professional agency now intent on exploding the patriarchy.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 7, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
These ideas are anything but easy, but on Easy Wonderful, Guster wraps its thoughtful approach to pop with the kind of outsized hooks that the band does better than just about anyone.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
For the most part, though, the formula results in an album that's both consistent and refined, a reflection of Grande's growing awareness of herself as an artist and her place in the world.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 17, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Throughout Sweet Heart Sweet Light, the lyrics are as thin as the songs are bare, and with lines like "Don't play with fire and you'll never get burned," the band feels dangerously close to becoming a parody of itself.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 9, 2012
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Whether the album is supposed to be taken as a contemporary tale or something closer to a retelling of Escovedo's personal history matters because, frankly, times have changed. This is why the album's most universal songs have the most resonance.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 12, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If anything, Villains could have used more overt pop influences, as it may have resulted in more delightfully wild experiments like the closing “Villains of Circumstance,” whose sulking verses contrast with sweeping, glitzy choruses to suggest Michael Bolton as a deranged Weimar-era cabaret singer.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 23, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album impresses as much for its craft as for the way it allows Forster to honor McLennan's passing even as it advances his own work.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If the intuitive, star-gazing Valtari served as the rediscovery of Sigur Rós's signature sound, then the instinctual, sober Kveikur is its compulsive reinvention.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jun 14, 2013
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
An album of relatively accessible pop music that pulses with the pain of a life in pieces.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What makes The Age of Adz an exception rather than some blatant hat-tip to those artists is Stevens's quirky trademarks.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Whereas on another album these kinds of sidepaths would be no more than frustrating distractions, here the scenery looks so good, you'll gladly take the long way home.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Mar 2, 2012
- Read full review
-
- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 7, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Of course, things were even more dire during the civil rights movement, and like the music that the Staple Singers produced during that era, If All I Was Was Black is hopeful and optimistic not in ignorance of political reality, but in spite of it.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 16, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Taken individually, the songs on ILYSM are all downright gorgeous, but by the time you get to “War on Terror,” a trembling five-minute acoustic ballad, after a string of several other trembling five-minute acoustic ballads, things start to feel monotonous. Whatever Ross’s limitations as a singer and arranger, though, when he brings his guitar playing to the fore, the results are much more expressive and gratifying.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 11, 2022
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Offend Maggie isn't a huge breakthrough for Deerhoof, but it's a step toward coherence with which few fans should have a problem.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
[Brittany Howard's] performance only confirms that she's the kind of pop vocal talent that only comes along a few times in a generation, while Sound & Color as a whole is proof that Alabama Shakes have got the chops to be a lot more than Muscle Shoals revivalists.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 20, 2015
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Its spaces of hollow inaction are far too big, and the concessions it expects of its audience far too large for so little payoff.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While Stevens often reaches great heights on The Ascension, he almost as often seems to get lost in his big ideas.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 21, 2020
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
What's most disappointing of all about The Future's Void is that, for all its heady ideas and pretty moments, in almost all ways it's a regression from Anderson's earlier work, a mishmash of half-completed thoughts that fails to ever fully connect.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 2, 2014
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Though far from The White Stripes' best work, Icky Thump is still plenty good, brash, and noisy in the way great rock records are supposed to be.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 21, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Traditional Techniques is less a revealing personal statement than a change of palette, with the singer-songwriter coloring his usual sarcastic wit with somber, muted tones.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Mar 4, 2020
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Devoid of the brawn that makes the Truckers so powerful and without a complementary voice off which to bounce, Hood's songs fall into a folksy rut.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It turns commonly held conceptions of canon on their head, implicitly asks for a more inclusive understanding of song craft, and—most of all--celebrates a group of songs that resonate in a variety of contexts and arrangements.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Mar 15, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It all manages to hang together thanks to the fact that, after some trial and error, Wasner and Stack have hit on a sound all their own.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 5, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The whip-smart hooks and spot-on production on Heart mask Walker's vocal deficiencies, which might otherwise be a more serious liability.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Bejar the enigmatic, drunken poet has for several Destroyer albums now taken a back seat to Bejar the singer and bandleader. And while the singing on Have We Met remains tastefully restrained, lyrically there are glimpses of the younger, brasher Bejar here.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 27, 2020
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Perhaps what's most encouraging about You Get What You Give, though, is that Zac Brown Band hasn't played it safe. Instead, they've played fast and loose with a set of influences that owe far less to country music than to Southern rock, jam bands, and reggae.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
His winking in-jokes and one-liners might have gotten the Internet's attention, but Ratchet wins you over when it reveals that this smart-aleck's got a beating heart too.- Slant Magazine
- Posted May 20, 2015
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Real Life Is No Cool is a creamy, luscious sequence of classically structured pop-funk tracks glittering with Lindstrøm's trademark brand of space dust. Formally, the work here is light years away from the proggier, more sprawling galaxies he's recently navigated; Christabelle's languid yet charismatic, definitive yet hazy vocals are given properly emphatic productions.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
His standard of work is so smart that the stupid parts come off refreshing, and even middle-range material like Mirror Traffic feels strikingly well-crafted.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 22, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Simple beats and waves of synthesized strings don't, in themselves, make for neo-disco euphoria.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Though the current incarnation of the Flaming Lips has been together since 2014, and thus responsible for these various digressions, the band has undertaken a sonic overhaul here that matches the emotional, sentimental tenor of Coyne and Steven Drozd’s new compositions.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 8, 2020
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The effect of all this quietness and patient exploration of song structure can be transcendent or it can be incredibly boring, and for both better and worse, April is more of the same.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The incarnation of the SteelDrivers as captured on Reckless has offered one of the year's strongest country records.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There’s long been a political edge to Protomartyr’s doom-and-gloom art rock, and it’s heartening that the band continues to avoid sloganeering and boring moralism.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jun 2, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With Emmaar, the band continues to construct a creative vision that remains true to the music of their native country while finding ways to incorporate more traditional North American blues elements.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 12, 2014
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Despite its allusions to seeking therapy, listening to the album feels like accompanying a friend on a disastrous Saturday night bender.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Mar 6, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album puts Krug front and center, armed with nothing but piano and voice. It's a ballsy move, but it pays off in spades.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 11, 2013
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The Weeknd is in full command of his craft, and at this point it's almost impossible for me to imagine that he won't deliver on the finale. He's earned my trust, as would any other artist who had already released two of the year's best albums.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 31, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Kill for Love is a great tribute to the grueling power of fatigue, an album that turns a dearth of ideas into a virtue.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 30, 2012
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Unafraid in her songwriting to lay bare her faults and flat-out embracing flaws in the album's jagged production. Pleasure isn't a perfect album, and that's the point.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 27, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
With American Slang, the Gaslight Anthem takes another step away from their riff-punk past, leaning more heavily on their classic-rock influences and letting their snotty, Warped Tour tendencies take more of a backseat than ever before.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Rock n’ roll is body music, and like the best electronic music, it aims for the gut. But even at their liveliest, the songs on 7 are designed for the head--a shot straight to the mind.- Slant Magazine
- Posted May 11, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Finally receiving distribution in the U.S., Junior Senior's Hey Hey My My Yo Yo sounds every bit as fresh and exuberant now as it first did in the summer of 2005.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Dye It Blonde may be a more accomplished production than Smith Westerns, but it's also a roundly enervating creation, drained of the fuzzy promise that defined the band's debut.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 18, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 2, 2012
- Read full review
-
- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The album’s satisfying and detail-rich production choices, courtesy of co-producers like Greg Kurstin and Mura Masa, achieve a tonal cohesion throughout.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 13, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
If anything, the album flows together even better than Volume 1, where the disparity between light-heartedness and heavier themes was an occasional distraction.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Dec 1, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Jim Noir works brilliantly on an escapist level, even though it rewards more active listening.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
For most of its runtime, Outside Society captures a time when Smith's music was as naïve, romantic, and unforced as her memoir, even if, by the end, the labored intensity of her poetry has prevailed.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 24, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 7, 2020
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
This is brainy, energizing stuff, and sometimes (such as on "Just Begun," where Kweli trades sharp bars with J. Cole, Jay Electronica, and Mos Def over a beautiful sax loop), it hits like lightning.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Traditionalists may bristle at the notion that they've lost yet another promising young talent to a more contemporary sound, but Follow Me Down proves that Jarosz has an intuitive grasp of traditional folk and bluegrass structures and a taste for more adventurous, modern song choices and arrangements.- Slant Magazine
- Posted May 19, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
A little muscle, and maybe even a little heavy-metal menace, would have balanced the album out nicely.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 29, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It might just as easily be christened their most intimate, their most casual, and their most soulful. All of these superlatives are relative, of course; the album grows in stature and appeal with every spin, and distinguishes itself as an Elbow album not quite like any other.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 1, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The band flips the traditional lexical of their genre, emphasizing the spaces between the anthemic, quasi-pavlovian verse-chorus-verse structure that defines classic rock n’ roll. The band’s sixth album, Future Ruins, similarly thrives in the spaces between the power chords and choruses.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 1, 2019
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
While the lyrics offer a precious few glimmers of defiance, Hackman’s production choices, featuring mostly instruments played by the musician herself, have the verve to suggest not only an artistic resurgence, but a personal one.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jan 11, 2024
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
His delivery is tender and delicate, his phrasing measured and sharp, and to the point that the voice cracks and flat notes that do inevitably arise seem by design, only adding to his emotional vulnerability. Acting as producer under his pseudonym Jack Frost, Dylan pristinely captures the subtle dynamics of his live touring band, adding only subdued horn charts by James Harper.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 6, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
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.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Dec 8, 2010
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
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.- Slant Magazine
- Posted May 7, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
You're Nothing provides another solid 12 tracks of loud, bleak teenage ennui, but with a comparative lack of genre diversity.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 19, 2013
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Marissa Nadler still retains the ghostly inscrutability that has always kept the singer's insistent weepiness from sounding pathetic.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jun 17, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The somber, subtle hand instills Transference with a fair amount of grace, an impressive feat for a band known more for its indie irreverence than its elegance.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Luckily, for both the album and its audience, the band's perseverance results in hits more often than misses.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Martha has proven to be not just a worthy pupil of such domestic tutelage, but a musician of equal caliber.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
On The Hum, this delicate balancing act between abrasive aggression and unfettered tunefulness positions Hookworms as an uncompromising experimental act with festival-sized ambitions, capable of synthesizing disparate and often contradictory sounds into a cohesive and compelling whole.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Nov 10, 2014
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Stay Gold, their third album, is less intimate than their previous effort, The Lion's Roar, but, backed by a 13-piece orchestra and gifted with a rare rapport and plangent voices, employed in close, modulated harmonies, the Söderbergs find their pitched balance in the melancholy and occasional loneliness of the quotidian.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jun 9, 2014
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The highlights demonstrate that these guys have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision, but by and large this is Lightning Bolt doing a Lightning Bolt album.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
There's a fearless, uninhibited confidence to Spektor's voice, not to mention a delightful whimsy to her music, that sets her apart from artists like [Fiona] Apple.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
After a while, Crutchfield's melodies also blend together, especially during the album's middle stretch, where the similar-sounding “Sparks Fly” and “Brass Beam” are sequenced back to back.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jul 5, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Canterbury Girls still succeeds at being Lily & Madeleine’s most personal and cohesive work to date, but the siblings too often seem as if they’re reluctant to let loose and lean into the music.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 25, 2019
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The band certainly hasn't left rock behind, but they've found a way to push beyond a sense of exhaustion with the resources that the genre has to offer, while at the same time reflecting on the tenuousness of interpersonal connection in an age of hyper-evolving technology.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Oct 31, 2013
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
As a pairing between two artists, the album works, though not nearly as much as it could have if both were at the top of their game.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Whatever C'mon lacks in newness it more than compensates for in intimacy and richness.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Apr 12, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Though their sonic palate is monochromatic, their music is both cogent and engrossing. Jinx feels like a hallucination that proves hard to shake.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jun 24, 2019
- Read full review
-
- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The reinterpretations offer interesting what-if scenarios, tweaking and altering familiar material, but inevitably reveal more about Bush's fussiness over her own legacy than anything else.- Slant Magazine
- Posted May 18, 2011
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
White Chalk, wholly self-contained and uncompromised, is a work of literary depth and complexity.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Presenting musical and lyrical content in discrete halves, it functions as a microcosm of the kind of balance that makes Lambchop great, a poetic focus on words that doesn't scrimp on the music.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Feb 21, 2012
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
They're a little more mature, a little tighter, but just as virile, and definitely not just cashing in.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 11, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
At times, the album’s lack of intensity allows the songs to sink into the background a little too easily. Sonically, they all have the same placid air about them, with few distinctive peaks or valleys. But even if the songs slide by effortlessly, this approach allows the Antlers to color in a moment without demanding too much attention. If and when you stop to really take these sweeping, solemn songs in, it’s clear that the Antlers are still capable of conjuring beauty.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Mar 23, 2021
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
“Run the Credits” rejects the notion that life fits into a neat, three-act narrative, and Hideous Bastard serves as a frank, compelling chapter in Sim’s.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Sep 6, 2022
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
At nearly 38 minutes, the album stays around long enough to where its effervescent nature starts to serve as a hindrance rather than a strength, where the age-old idiom of “in one ear and out the other” begins to ring truer than ever before.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jul 25, 2023
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
They were probably aiming for hypnotic or dreamy, but except for the cinematic bookends 'The Stations' and 'Front Street,' the slow dances mostly crash-land in Snoresville- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Keep It Hid suggests just as strongly that Auerbach is able to stand as a compelling solo act.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
The sneaky-sounding arpeggios and the hushed, fragile vocal performances that defined albums like Our Endless Numbered Days are eschewed in favor of bright strumming and unbridled joyousness, rendering most of Beast Epic undeniably pretty but ultimately toothless. That's not to say Beast Epic doesn't sometimes explore hefty themes.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 15, 2017
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Warp & Weft is Veirs's most expansive effort yet, with obvious musical and thematic ties to experimental Americana.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Aug 14, 2013
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
It's a layered, engaging addition to one of indie-rock's most slept-on songbooks.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Jul 3, 2018
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Hutchison and his bandmates reward patience as well as repeated listens, and they deserve credit for unearthing a unique chunk of the Scottish heart, raised on equal parts American punk and traditional folk and bleeding beautifully.- Slant Magazine
- Read full review
-
- Critic Score
Ocean Blvd traffics in some nimble, effervescent melodies, a few memorable vocal passages, and the occasional tuneful duet (Father John Misty proves to be an exceptional bedfellow on “Let the Light In”). But the album feels more like a placeholder in Del Rey’s discography than a truly audacious chapter in the singer’s blossoming late-period reawakening.- Slant Magazine
- Posted Mar 24, 2023
- Read full review