Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,119 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: 1,689 out of 3119
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3119
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3119
3119 music reviews
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    • 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
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 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
    • 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.
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