Slant Magazine's Scores

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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
Highest review score: 100 Who Kill
Lowest review score: 0 Fireflies
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,687 out of 3117
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3117
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3117
3117 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.
    • 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
    • 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
    • 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.
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