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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    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bloom
    The songs that leave the most lasting impression are the most downbeat.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Singles
    As a whole feels like a more complete and satisfying journey than either of Goldfrapp's last two albums, progressing confidently from crushing guitar-driven boogie to weightless space pop.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Beyoncé
    What makes the album significant is the fact that its creator is a bona fide superstar who, apparently, seems to care more about following her creative bliss than scoring easy hits. And it takes her (and us) to some mighty weird and exhilarating places.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    evermore
    The stories she tells are about how her narrators’ choices impact others, often in ways that cause irreparable harm. That makes the songwriting a bit riskier than on Folklore, and not all of those risks pay off. If that means Evermore isn’t quite as strong as that album, she nonetheless managed to release two of the finest albums of her career in the span of just a few months.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Before Today
    There are times when the garish rehash feels a tad too on the nose.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kaputt
    Not all of Kaputt is so dynamic, and many of the songs require a few listens before they begin to assert their individual identities. But Kaputt does contain riches to rival the previous highpoints in the Destroyer canon.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mental Illness
    Mann's best work has always lingered on such private reverie, and Mental Illness is one of her most ravishing and affecting hymns to solitude.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Oblivions
    She successfully translates her confessional tone and subject matter into melodically and atmospherically engaging songs, resulting in an album that represents a significant step for one of contemporary music’s most eloquent artists.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Chicago Sessions
    Even if it isn’t necessarily a pivotal effort, [The Chicago Sessions] is marked by an endearing lack of affectation that only one of the greatest country songwriters can achieve.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    And Nothing Hurt
    Motivated more by financial necessity than the hubris it must take to even believe such an undertaking would be feasible, Pierce nonetheless constructs a thickly layered album. And while its inherent limitations are evident at times, it's a work of characteristic ambition and poignancy.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Warm
    None of Tweedy’s studio work has ever quite captured how funny he can be in this format, and for the most part, Warm is no exception. But the album comes close, in both timbre and tone, to reflecting the unvarnished Tweedy that shows up at his solo shows.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electric Dirt
    The songs are new but have the worn familiarity of something pulled from storage, all the trilling organs and honky-tonk shuffles, made thinner and more poignant by the passage of time.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Flower Boy
    If “maturity” isn't quite the word for Flower Boy, however, the album is nevertheless a significant milestone. This is easily Tyler's most emotionally risky, and rewarding, work to date--and, in its own way, more transgressive than anything from Odd Future's punk-rap peak.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Echo
    At just under 30 minutes long, the Portland-based singer-songwriter’s 11th album is more concise than it is confessional, but Veirs imbues her lyrics with vivid imagery and gentle humor that trade misery for escapism.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Ballad of Darren
    While The Ballad of Darren may be an emotional journey, it lacks a proper conclusion—though that’s likely by design.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Apollo Kids
    Much like Raekwon on his 2009 landmark, Ghostface manages to steal the show despite the esteemed roll of guest spots. His rapid-fire delivery and blitz of sassy metaphors set a high-octane pace.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Something to Give Each Other
    What Something to Give Each Other lacks in poignancy, though, is made up for by the joy with which it embraces queer pleasure.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Is Happening
    As good as this record is (and it is often very good), LCD Soundsystem can do, and has done, much better.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Once Twice Melody
    Beach House’s hymn to the grandeur of relationships is, perhaps, the most musically diverse and thematically mature project the duo has released to date—an emphatic affirmation of life’s joys and sorrows.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Treats
    Even though it's as ambitious an exercise in freeform genre-splicing and pure, amp-blowing volume as has been attempted in the past few years, it's always at least as fun as it is smart, taking the three great pillars of guilty-pleasure music (deafening arena-rock swagger, sugary pop hooks, and delirious dance beats) and rolling them together into a singularly appealing cacophony.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hell On Heels
    None of this would work if the songs weren't actually good, but they're frequently brilliant.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sugar Mountain: Live At Canterbury House 1968
    Sugar Mountain is less impressive than Massey Hall but it offers more insight, catching Young at a peak of undiscovered exuberance, sharing loose stories between songs, strumming aimlessly and joking with the crowd.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blood Bitch
    An intimate existential chronicle of imprisonment and liberation, its visceral, blood-smeared intensity works off a steady heartbeat of acute artistic ferment, the roiling passion underlying Hval's powerful declaration of self.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Down to Believing
    The taut and engaging first half of Down to Believing juxtaposes formidable country-rock like "I Lost My Crystal Ball" and the garage-rock-at-heart "Tear Me Apart" against more poised and controlled expressions of emotional unrest.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014
    Even if Wilco is in danger of running out of interesting new places to take their sound, it's only because, as Alpha Mike Foxtrot is a convincing testament to, they've spent the last 20 years taking it to so many places already.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wildheart
    D'Angelo may have struck a new gold standard for intellectual R&B, and even recorded a more traditionally cohesive and satisfying album, but Miguel's cocktail of furious angst, pained perplexity, and damaged tenderness is just as relevant, acknowledging the complicated realities of modern sexuality while pushing to expand its horizons.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What's Your Pleasure?
    What’s Your Pleasure? is an album that, just a few months ago, might have felt like a nostalgia trip or a guilty pleasure, but now feels like manna for the soul.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Takk...
    As music that's beautiful simply for the sake of being beautiful, Takk… is an unqualified success.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics
    Adrian Younge Presents is intermittently thrilling, taking familiar genre signifiers and scrambling them within a less rigid context, but also eventually formulaic in a different way, setting a fixed eccentric template and largely sticking to it.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    MCII
    This is an album that exudes playfulness, treating genre as something that's malleable and isn't afraid to poke open wounds if it means creating a piece of art that connects emotionally.
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