Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,121 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: 1,691 out of 3121
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3121
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3121
3121 music reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Every Loser
    Despite a few clumsy moments, Every Loser proves that Pop not only has more to say, but continues to find exciting ways to say them.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Healing Is a Miracle
    Healing Is a Miracle can sometimes be so delicate as to be weightless, and the music’s accumulation of details and small shifts in tone makes it more interesting in theory than practice. Even still, the album overcomes its slightness thanks to its willingness to dabble in different textures.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Last Rider
    In the end, The Last Rider isn't quite as memorable as Retriever, on which Sexsmith hit his stride as a pop songwriter, or Blue Boy, which boasted a charmingly ragged production courtesy of Steve Earle. But the album has its pleasures.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Because Of The Times
    However admirable and surprising the band's ambition throughout Because Of The Times may be, not every experiment works so well.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Bird
    Chambers just gets structure, and it's that know-how that makes Little Bird one of her finest albums.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Remember Her Name
    Guyton’s wide-ranging vocals have a way of investing even the weakest tracks on Remember Her Name with a freshness and power, sometimes belting an octave or two higher in a way that emphasizes the weight that her words carry.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mount Wittenberg Orca [EP]
    Within the narrow confines of the EP, that uneasy balance between hopelessness and guarded optimism is given voice through the blend of Dirty Projectors's bouncing vocal harmonies (the gratingly forthright "eh-eh-eh-eh" verses in "On and Ever Onward") and Björk's reliably magenta undertones (and yes, I do mean "magenta" in the Blanche Devereaux sense).
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Guider
    Guider may be a little jagged around the edges, but it's that one-take immediacy that gives the record its legs. Observing this brand of ultra-violence is thrilling, but the action can be a bit messy at times.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Accelerate
    If it isn't able to recapture the post-punk energy of "Reckoning," the political fury of "Life's Rich Pageant," or the epic scope of "Automatic for the People," the album, at the very least, finds the band playing to its strengths rather than attempting to explore an increasingly thin artistic mythology. That alone justifies Accelerate's positive buzz, even if the album doesn't quite support the magnitude of it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jump Rope Gazers
    Songs like “Dying to Believe” and “Out of Sight” keep this energy going, with drummer Tristan Deck and bassist Benjamin Sinclair maintaining a brisk rhythm section as Stokes and Jonathan Pearce’s guitars shimmer, groove, and ignite in equal measure. But the Beths are, perhaps, at their best when they’re at their breeziest.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Night Time, My Time
    Night Time, My Time might just be the sort of gaunt, darkly painted neurosis needed to combat popular music's deluge of silly and crude self-affirmations.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nouns
    The band's live performances, politics, and loyalty to their fanbase are to be admired, but Nouns will leave you wanting more.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Entering Heaven Alive
    It’s at this blurry intersection of inscrutability and openness, of pure persona and slavish authenticity, that White has often done his best work. Much of Entering Heaven Alive exists too far to one side of that spectrum.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big To-Do
    The Big To-Do suffers from the opposite problem, with its workmanlike consistency belying its lack of truly astonishing highs.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ultraviolet
    With Ultraviolet, Kylesa has once again established themselves in the great tradition of hard-rockers who've realized it's possible to make a "dark" album without sacrificing accessibility, further proving that heavy riffs and great hooks aren't mutually exclusive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All I Intended To Be
    From her choices of collaborators and material to her extraordinary singing, Intended proves that Harris's greatest gift is her dead-on instincts.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    COW / Chill Out, World!
    COW‘s inward-looking is often gray and formless, and suggests that Paterson and Fehlmann are indeed best understood when exploring the concepts they can’t understand.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Convivial
    while Convivial sometimes sounds urgent (as on album standouts like the soaring, gothic 'Love You All' and the bright and twitchy 'Gets Along Fine'), virtually nothing about it sounds truly fresh.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love Is Not Pop
    This is pop with a light touch and a tremendously heavy heart; it only qualifies as easy listening if you can distance yourself from Assbring's expressive singing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Pick A Bigger Weapon
    [Riley's] lyrics are simultaneously clever and uninteresting: he rarely transcends an ABAB or AABB rhyme scheme, practically never rhymes within the lines, and his meter and diction lack intricacy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Take Care
    On Take Care, Drake finally shows he's got the talent to match the hype.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wasting Light
    Wasting Light appears to be just another good, if forgettable, entry in the Foo Fighters catalogue.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Country Music
    It's the spectacular collection of songs as much as Burnett's ace production and Nelson's first-rate performances that elevates Country Music above the recent spate of country covers records and makes the album an essential addition to Nelson's rich catalogue.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    At Mount Zoomer
    With At Mount Zoomer, Wolf Parade has quite easily surpassed the greatness that was their debut, and have very quietly made one of the better albums of 2008.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Star Is Born [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
    There’s undoubtedly a strong 10-song album lodged at the core of A Star Is Born, but unlike the film, wherein an outsized sense of sentimentality is rendered affecting by the more grounded performances, there’s not nearly enough substance here to justify all the bombast.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    (Watch My Moves)
    He doesn’t bring his roguish charm to his latest. Though this album will satisfy those nostalgic for the mellower side of ‘70s and ‘90s rock, it doesn’t chart new terrain for Vile.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It's All True
    It's All True takes a sullen half-back step into the Junior Boys' mood-lit comfort zone, sounding not so much like capitulation than the chastened partying that follows an especially bad hangover: Last night things got a little out of hand, so tonight they're just having a few friends over to drink and play old dance records.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Surprise
    What is startling about Simon's latest solo effort is how fresh and alive it sounds.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oxymoron
    He has the instincts of a good storyteller, and maybe even the potential to be a standard bearer for his art form, but when he falls back on tired "pimps and hoes" narratives, he sounds firmly, frustratingly rooted in the past.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Home Before Dark
    The result is an album of the kind of sophisticated pop that proves that such exemplary songcraft should always be relevant.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Haunted Man
    While the album's comparatively restrained arrangements occasionally wilt in the face of Khan's fierce melodrama, The Haunted Man is still a worthy, often gorgeous entry in the Bat for Lashes canon.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In the Morse Code of Brake Lights
    It doesn’t sound like one of Newman’s more intimate, acoustic-focused solo albums, exactly—too many orchestral flourishes, hyperactive keyboards, and Case showcases for that—but at least half of it feels more like A.C. Newman & Friends than any of the band’s previous efforts.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Spade
    The Spade is a riotous album that recalls '80s-era Springsteen and Mellencamp, and Walker is smart enough to know not to take any of it too seriously.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In Ear Park
    Songs begin lethargically and the vocals and instruments grope at each other, struggling to agree on how to establish the rhythm. Once they coalesce, each blooms, but the tracks refuse to linger in the thrall of the climax.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Away
    Despite some conceptual shakiness and a few instances of turgid sentimentality, Sheff is doing fine on his own, continuing to detail unsteady emotional ground with a characteristic mixture of self-assurance and existential dread.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seventh Tree
    Seventh Tree is most compelling for the way in which the band's regained austerity and naturalism contrasts with their more recent hedonism.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spirituals
    Her least celebratory album to date, Spirituals is nonetheless ornate and often frenetic, managing to give her pent-up anxiety a kind of release.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Neon
    When Neon provides him with a song that's actually worthy of his considerable chops, Young really shines. It's a shame, then, that most of the set finds Young fighting an uphill battle against some lackluster material.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Twelve Reasons to Die
    The most arresting of Twelve Reasons to Die's many pleasures is how out of time the album feels: Its pointed narrative distance from straight-faced gangster rap is very 2013, but the simple virtuosity of the small moments smacks of eras in both rap and soul that passed long before Ghost ever stepped to a mic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Demolished Thoughts
    After a decade of pensive chamber-pop lullabies from a number of artists, it feels like there's no new ground to break in this particular subgenre.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sympathy for Life
    Sympathy for Life lacks the emotional vulnerability of 2016’s Human Performance and, despite some entrancing synths, the zany eclecticism of 2018’s Wide Awake! But the charm of A. Savage and Andrew Brown’s lackadaisical voices and chummy melodies haven’t lost a bit of their allure.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Diamond Eyes
    When Diamond Eyes isn't trying quite so hard to be a great record, though, it ends up being a pretty good one.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    No Better Than This
    No Better Than This works as well as it does because it plays to Mellencamp's strengths. His genuine empathy for rural living and his occasional hell-raising both come through in equal measure.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Getting Into Knives
    Their work manages to feel simultaneously overproduced and under-thought.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Chronicles of Marnia
    The Chronicles of Marnia is her most accessible effort to date.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cannibal Sea
    Cannibal Sea is a mellow concoction well-suited to fans of cerebral indie pop.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Singing Mailman Delivers
    With a stable of effective songs and a healthy dose of good humor, The Singing Mailman Delivers remains a likable, if not terribly compelling, effort.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Work
    It’s a shame that his first album in over half a decade doesn’t push his musical ideas a little further, and in some moments, The Work feels almost like an addendum to 2016’s Good Luck and Do Your Best, but the results are still undeniably affecting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Clear Pond Road
    Like Hersh herself, the album resists convention and refuses to be pinned down.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Saint Dymphna
    Yet as compared to their previous efforts, the album is surprisingly accessible and at times almost poppy-a valiant attempt at distilling, or translating, the Gang Gang Dance experience into the album format.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eternally Even
    Eternally Even is the sound of a road-worn artist, whose music normally channels the awe and splendor of his country, challenging its structure and finding the deepest valley he's ever seen.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Happy Hollow
    Happy Hollow is far too grouchy to be taken seriously.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Animals
    Rather than cutting and pasting samples and calling it a day, he skillfully weaves them together with improvisational live instrumentation. With Animals, analog and electronic, and past and present, are placed in an engaging dialogue.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Atlas
    If Real Estate captured the essence of summer, and Days maintained an unmistakably autumnal aura, then Atlas, the most thematically mature of the three, could easily be classified as Real Estate's wintery opus.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deeper Well
    But if the album’s unwaveringly restrained instrumentation holds it back from ranking alongside Musgraves’s best work, it’s still a welcome shift away from the country pop of 2018’s Golden Hour.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Wrecking Ball
    Written from the perspective of a demolished stadium, it's broad and disappointingly simple, wallowing in cheap nostalgia and chummy good feelings.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The True False Identity
    As he routinely does with other artists' material, Burnett has outdone himself on the album's production; it's the material itself that's a bit underwhelming.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bottle It In
    This affinity for aimless trains of thought applies to the whole of Bottle It In, an album where Vile is quick to conjure up a bevy of interesting images or ideas but struggles to find a compelling way to contain them.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Saturday Night
    American stands as perhaps the most consistent set of material Paisley has committed to record.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Silver Gymnasium
    Ostensibly about a specific time and place, The Silver Gymnasium confirms Okkervil River as a band that's still too crafty to settle for anything so simple as a straightforward paean to childhood, using this boilerplate structure to examine the deeper meaning behind the natural impulse to fixate on the past.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Kamaal The Abstract
    With Kamaal, one of hip-hop's finest has once again redefined his game--and upped the ante for the whole hip-hop genre in the process.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sun
    A collection of songs that represent a dynamic snapshot of the singer-songwriter in steady command of her craft while still occasionally giving way to passages of thin-skinned, deeply revealing storytelling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Swimming
    Swimming captures Miller at a creative apex where he's acutely aware of where he's been and where he can go.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sremm 4 Life
    Perhaps the album could have felt a tad more engaging if it attempted to do a little more both sonically and lyrically, but Slim and Swae, as well as longtime producer Mike-Will-Made-It, know exactly what they excel at and they do an excellent job at doing just that.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hackney Diamonds
    As high-energy and catchy as most of Hackney Diamonds is, though, the album also showcases a few tracks that suggest that the Stones might be better off embracing their age rather than asserting their eternal youthfulness (“I’m too old for dying and too young to lose,” Jagger declares on “Depending on You”).
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bad Self Portraits
    Bigger, louder, and more eclectic works well on Bad Self Portraits, but smaller, quieter, and more precise was what made the band's earlier efforts so distinctive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sex And Gasoline
    Still, even at its most strident, Sex and Gasoline is topical and fiercely intelligent in a way that few modern country albums are.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Better Oblivion Community Center
    The songs on Better Oblivion Community Center are contemplative rather than declarative, granting the artists a chance to approach sorrow in a cheekier manner and find reserves of hope amid the wreckage.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Paranoïa, Angels, True Love
    What follows is a collection of wiry, introspective songs that break from pop conventions while asserting the life-affirming power of love.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sisterworld
    For Liars, it's another triumph of stylized strangeness--and the third consecutive album on which they've proven themselves to be one of the most creative and compelling acts in the musical underground.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Go-Go Boots
    Go-Go Boots aims for a soulful, introspective vibe, but it ends up as the dullest album in the Truckers's catalogue.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heretofore
    Heretofore highlights the technical skill and genre-blurring vision that makes Megafaun one of the most captivating acts in Americana. But when their ideas run too far out of bounds, the album also makes it clear that Megafaun hasn't quite figured themselves out yet.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    St. Peter & 57th St. [Live]
    St. Peter & 57th St. shows the current Preservation Hall lineup in a flattering light--that is, as exponents of a musical sensibility not so much trapped in amber as preserved via community.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Post Tropical
    Post Tropical succeeds in proving that music is often at its most compelling when it can't be compared or reduced to much of anything at all.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Total Life Forever
    Like its perfectly integrated packaging, Total Life Forever is successful because of attention paid to the things around it, a combination of direct influence and creative rigor that makes for a stirring experience.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sincerely, Future Pollution
    Sincerely, Future Pollution's contrast of bright synths with dark lyrics shows the band approaching their sound with refreshing irony. By filtering the seedier byproducts of our modern world through their gaudy yet gloomy lens, Timber Timbre reflects the hyperbole of an increasingly toxic culture.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Marry Me
    Marry Me isn't quite a religious experience, but it's unequivocally divine.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Path of Wellness
    The album’s early singles “High in the Grass” and “Worry with You” both play off of Sleater-Kinney’s strengths, the former showing off the ever-expanding reach of Tucker’s voice and the latter sporting one of the band’s sneakily catchy hooks. On the other hand, songs like the dour “Tomorrow’s Grave” sound a little too familiar and fail to push the group beyond their previously established template.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Love Invention
    Lyrically, Goldfrapp occasionally leans too far into pop simplicity. ... Later in the album, though, when Goldfrapp gets more experimental—or at least dispenses with conventional pop structures—things begin to feel more immersive.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Boy King
    By blatantly exposing a core of raw sexuality, previously presented only indirectly in their music, the group ends up removing any possible release valve while stripping the songs of nuance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sainthood
    The irreverent, snide wit and easy self-deprecation prove to be an effective, if surprising, fit for Tegan and Sara's brand of genial indie-pop, elevating Sainthood beyond mere snappy diversion.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Made In The Dark
    Hot Chip boldly expand and louden up their sound significantly here, while admirably retaining full command of the forms they've already mastered.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    To Willie
    The fact that the album works may speak most to the strength of Nelson's original material, but To Willie certainly has a creaky, good-natured charm, is light on frills, and puts a clear focus on the songwriting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    S&M2 [Live]
    Burton was a classical music aficionado, and was said to have introduced elements like harmony and sophistication into Metallica’s early no-frills thrash. S&M2 puts that influence on full display.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ghost Forests
    It’s a perfectly-balanced 36 minutes, and hopefully a foreshadow of more collaborations to come.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Anxiety
    Despite all its plasticized production and cartoon antics, however, what makes Anxiety so endearing is that it's the candid expression of an artist with nothing left to hide, and something real to share.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Josephine
    Rather than wallow morosely, he uses death as the focal point for an expressive song cycle that takes in the whole realm of life, with darkness frequently felt but not always the dominant emotion.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    TANGK
    Tangk underpins its more personal and emotional lyrics with rich, layered arrangements. It’s in this delicate balance of sound and sentiment that the album finds its groove—not always in the heights it occasionally struggles to reach, but in its earnest exploration of love.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star-Crossed
    Musgraves’s follow-up, Star-Crossed, is just as effortlessly melodic and accessible. But it’s also more eclectic, far afield of modern radio tropes, either of the pop or country varieties.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Hundred Things Keep Me Up At Night
    In the end, the album's real failing is not its individual flaws but a dry, rote feeling that descends halfway through the album, where you realize you're listening to little more than a reheated punk snarl that has been cleaned up and shipped back to the U.S. from overseas more than 30 years after the fact.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Bless This Mess
    Meghan Remy seems to want it both ways, as she flips between sincerity and irony across her eighth album as U.S. Girls. These conflicting approaches end up negating one another and result in a work that sign-posts its themes and musical choices but lacks a coherent overall vision.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Here's To Being Here
    Even though the album's production aims for and achieves a vintage AM radio sound, Collett's willingness to subvert the conventions of songwriters like Dylan or Kristofferson makes Here a definitively modern record and perhaps the first of Collett's solo albums to sound like a real classic.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Long Island Shores
    With so little substance, Long Island Shores is simply pretty for the sake of being pretty.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Humor Risk
    Humor Risk isn't a perfect album by any stretch, but it does provide another striking glimpse into the picaresque, tongue-in-cheek tragedies that mark McCombs's unique songwriting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sus Dog
    Chris Clark’s Sus Dog tries on a number of stylistic tics—from stuttering electronics to eerie vocals—that recall those of its executive producer, Thom Yorke, but rarely finds a means of organically incorporating them into the IDM veteran’s bass-heavy sound.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Local Business
    [Local Business] is full of tracks that might seem less silly were they more hot-blooded and more akin to the raging storms kicked up on The Monitor and The Airing of Grievances.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rabbit Fur Coat
    A left-of-center delight that will tide over the Rilo Kiley faithful until their next album.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Stand Ins
    It's a straight line from Pet Sounds to Pulp's Different Class, and while Stand Ins and its predecessor share R&B riffs affected with a country twang, connecting this latest dip in the Okkervil to a '90s Pulp-y-ness is a refreshing move.
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