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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Serpent & the Sphere
    The album's preference for atmosphere over hooks, plus the paucity and snarling incomprehensibility of its vocals, makes it ideal for pondering whatever mystery that captures one's fancy. But it also has a clear point of view.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You
    It's a tribute to Case's ever-growing strength as a songwriter that she refuses to take the sharp edges off the vicissitudes her songs depict while still acknowledging the humor and occasional beauty of those edges.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burn Your Fire for No Witness
    Burn Your Fire for No Witness is noisier, brasher, and more confident than its languid predecessor.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Invasion of Privacy
    Cardi climbed her way up from the bottom, and Invasion of Privacy is a soundtrack for anyone who dreams of doing the same.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran
    Johnson and the small army of country stars he's enlisted to collaborate on the project all wisely keep the focus on Cochran's extraordinary songwriting, making for an album that highlights the depth and range of Cochran's catalogue and the monumental influence his writing has had on country music.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    ANIMA
    Anima still achieves a sonic and thematic through line. The album’s juxtaposition of lyrical techno-dread with austere, ghostly electronic music is satisfyingly unsettling. The lyrics are evocative in their economy, and rather than feel like guide tracks, the arrangements feel more fully realized than on Yorke’s past albums.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sparkle Hard
    Malkmus has been prone to juxtaposing tasteful pop songs with classic-rock elements and offbeat lyrics since Slanted and Enchanted, and the audible delight he still takes in such musical mischief is apparent throughout Sparkle Hard.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Crane Wife
    Certain listeners will declare The Crane Wife the best record yet from the Decemberists, but it’s still too inconsistent to be declared the masterpiece of which Meloy and company are capable.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Extraordinary Machine
    For every song that's been improved there's one that's been unnecessarily tooled with.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    WORLD WIDE WHACK
    WWW may be a candid and sophisticated analysis of the dark side of fame, but it’s also eminently entertaining and occasionally funny, and it (re)establishes Whack as one of the most creative rappers in the game.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Look to the East, Look to the West
    Unusual musical choices, like the inclusion of glockenspiel on “Denon,” create some sonic interest. More than anything, though, Camera Obscura excels at generating a mood and a sense of warmth. If they stick too closely to familiar sonic territory on Look to the East, Look to the West, it is, at least, one that they’ve mastered.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hey What
    The album seamlessly blends the nightmarish and the romantic, interweaving our perennial hopes and the terrors we can’t shake off.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Carry Fire
    The album's roots go back to Zeppelin's immersion in English folk and American blues, but here Plant displays everything he’s learned along the way; Carry Fire's sophistication and mystique place it among the most ambitious and evocative albums of his legendary career.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Don't Forget Me
    The album’s 10 brisk, lightly rocking songs evoke the radio-friendly pop-rock of early-2000s Sheryl Crow or Jewel while sometimes, as on the title track, looking further back to ’70s soft rock a la Carole King.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Negro Swan
    It's this ability to capture both sides with equal commitment--the struggle and the resistance through self-love--that makes Negro Swan Hynes's most assured, accomplished, and significant album to date.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cuz I Love You
    Expertly sequenced in a concise, 33-minute package, Cuz I Love You moves from strength to strength. Even its more minor tracks feature standout moments.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sweet Warrior
    The tightness of Thompson's compositions grounds the explosive, whimsical meandering of his improvs; Sweet Warrior, and "Guns Are The Tongues" in particular, captures that glory as well as anything else from this century.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tarot Sport
    Tarot Sport makes its mark: easy and challenging at the same time, a mix of harsh and smooth sounds that mirrors the prickly juxtaposition of classic jazz.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Vince Staples
    Vince Staples is another microcosmic release from the rapper, his leisurely approach suggesting a newfound confidence.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Currents
    Although Currents is, in many ways, a showcase of difference (from his previous guitar-driven efforts, from some previous influences, even from other recently successful forays into disco-pop such as Daft Punk's Random Access Memories), Parker also toys with repetition as a unifying theme, sonically and lyrically.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    PRE PLEASURE
    Jacklin spends most of Pre Pleasure offering captivatingly penetrating personal commentary, whether backed by distorted guitars or mere whispers of arrangements.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Shadow in Time
    By comparison, “A Shadow in Time” is atmospheric, cohesive, and less discernably a loop. Its fogginess and amorphous instrumentation brings to mind a long, somber walk through thick and uneven woods, or a slow submergence into the sea; the strings seem like wisps of wind, the synths like sluggish sands, and the sound effects imitate light pinging off glass.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Off On The Pain
    The material explores a broader range of complex and wrenching emotions, and it marks the most consistent set of songs Allan has yet recorded.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Multiply
    An album that, in its best moments, draws comparisons to at-peak Prince and, at its worst, lands in the respectable company of Nikka Costa’s Everybody Got Their Something.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Suddenly
    It’s a treat to listen to the way such a masterful musician mines his own record collection for inspiration. What makes the album so spectacular, though, is Snaith’s voice. ... Throughout, his mesmerizing vocals elevate songs that might otherwise scan as banal.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Electric
    The Pet Shop Boys have once again given themselves a lease on another era, and Price was obviously the right choice to help them do so.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Modern Vampires of the City
    The songs may be dense and literary, but they're also immediately potent on a purely visceral level, striking a perfect balance that makes for what's perhaps the best album in a year already thick with great material.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Eternal Sunshine
    If there’s a primary critique to be leveled at Eternal Sunshine, it’s that the midtempo R&B that defined Grande’s last two albums, Positions and Thank U, Next, is once again so prominent. The house-pop “Yes, And?” is a bit of a bait and switch, as only two other tracks on the album, the disco-infused “Bye” and the Robyn-esque “We Can’t Be Friends,” stray from Grande’s preferred musical mode. That’s not to say that the album’s R&B fare isn’t satisfying in its own right.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    El Camino
    The album hurtles forward with all the momentum and subtlety of a cannonball, and it's best either to get on board or just to get the hell out of the way.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Celebration
    Okay, so the legitimacy of the song selection can, in this Cuisinart iteration, only be appraised on a case-by-case basis. How do the songs sound? And are the mixes definitive? Great and mostly, respectively.
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