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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    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Deacon
    On Deacon, Wise continues to prove how insightful he is at weaving his romantic obsessions with painfully honest, emotional expressions of his personal fuck-ups. Only this time his songs are more earthbound, grounded in the secular rather than the celestial.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Green to Gold
    At times, the album’s lack of intensity allows the songs to sink into the background a little too easily. Sonically, they all have the same placid air about them, with few distinctive peaks or valleys. But even if the songs slide by effortlessly, this approach allows the Antlers to color in a moment without demanding too much attention. If and when you stop to really take these sweeping, solemn songs in, it’s clear that the Antlers are still capable of conjuring beauty.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Chemtrails Over the Country Club
    Working again in close collaboration with composer and producer Jack Antonoff, the album is gorgeously, if a bit too tastefully, arranged, prizing pared-back piano and light-handed acoustic guitar.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers
    The rest of The Moon and Stars is a similarly ambitious, dizzying jumble of genres and tones, and June manages to hold everything together on the power of her beguiling voice and charisma.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    When You See Yourself
    With the band’s musicianship in peak form, it’s Caleb’s songwriting that limits the album’s impact. Marriage and fatherhood have expanded his inner monologue beyond fratboy misogyny and rock-star posturing. But he still doesn’t have much of interest to say.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Shadow I Remember
    The intensity of Cloud Nothings’s sonics—all of the wailing noises a guitar can produce as well as hard-hitting, double-time drumming—provide a cathartic outlet with which to confront the pains of self-definition and personal growth in an ever-amorphous world.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Open Door Policy
    The band’s ability to get to the heart of this change and create compelling songs from familiar scenes helps make Open Door Policy the best Hold Steady album in over a decade.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!
    The lyrics are endearing in their quirky honesty (he quips of Sean Parker, an ex’s ex: “I think he started Spotify”). But backed by yet another sumptuous sonic tapestry—including finger-picked guitar and spacey sound effects—they sound like nothing less than Tasjan finally figuring out exactly who he is.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    When You Found Me
    When You Found Me is what happens when a talented songwriter and a skilled band shoots for the hills and misfires.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Future Bites
    The Future Bites is neither a huge stylistic departure nor the betrayal that many Wilson diehards have claimed it to be. Conceptually, the album revolves around a post-apocalyptic vision of an overly materialist society, and while the electro-pop trappings are almost never “happy,” they serve as a slick backdrop to the dystopian landscape Wilson envisions.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    We Will Always Love You
    These songs are more akin to paintings: Samples comprise skeletal underpaintings to which mind-bending Moog passages and the human voice give shape, texture, and weight. This time around, things are more akin to Tame Impala’s Currents, than the Beastie Boys’s Paul’s Boutique, though “Take Care in Your Dreaming,” one of the album’s few hip-hop-inflected cuts, is especially mesmerizing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nightmare Vacation
    The album suggests that self-adulation can be just as therapeutic as unleashing rage, showing off Rico’s artistic range in the process.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cyr
    The singer’s m.o. has long been to cram each project with every creative idea he has—an approach that, though effective during the Pumpkins’s heyday, now largely results in diminishing returns. It would be time better spent fleshing out songs that are too often merely shadows of ideas.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Plastic Hearts
    Cyrus’s habit of enlisting high-profile artists from the upper echelon of a given genre continues here with appearances by Jett, Billy Idol, and Stevie Nicks, who all adequately do their thing. As usual, though, Cyrus is most indelible when her own voice takes center stage and the music mingles with and amplifies her messages of self-empowerment and emotional culpability. If nothing else, Plastic Hearts gives her license to unapologetically rock out.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    BE
    For better or worse, Be’s sights are trained on BTS fans, meaning the album is too insular for broader appeal.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Good News
    While Megan is still figuring herself out stylistically, she’s undeniably in touch with herself. Throughout Good News, Megan doesn’t spend all that much time referencing her beloved alter egos: the pimp persona of Tina Snow, the lustful Hot Girl, and the relatable Suga. Rather, she coalesces qualities of each in her lyricism and delivery, suggesting that the mask is off and she’s being wholly, 100% herself.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    5EPs
    Taken together, the EPs function as a grab bag of Dirty Projectors’s collaborative strengths and interests, affirming their indie bona fides in a new form.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Starting Over
    The album balances these syrupy moments with a batch of harder-edged tracks that showcase Stapleton’s biting electric guitar riffing but don’t do much to elevate his lyrics. Predictably, he just shifts his focus from love and tenderness to mild hedonism.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    DISCO
    While the album might be a purely derivative work, its period arrangements—all sweeping disco strings, Nile Rodgers-esque guitar licks, and indiscriminately deployed cowbell—are executed with aplomb.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Positions
    Given the dearth of uptempo tracks on Grande’s last album, the microhouse “Motive,” featuring Doja Cat, and the breathless, disco-inflected “Love Language” are a welcome change of pace. Too many of the songs on Positions, however, rely on the same midtempo trap-pop that populated Grande’s previous two efforts, particularly Thank U, Next. What once seemed refreshing in its minimalism is quickly starting to feel insubstantial.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Featuring Ty Dolla $ign
    Featuring Ty Dolla $ign has the air of a haphazard playlist. Griffin is still a formidable center of gravity for a small army of eager collaborators, but the final product wants for some necessary fine-tuning.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Getting Into Knives
    Their work manages to feel simultaneously overproduced and under-thought.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fake It Flowers
    The songs on Fake It Flowers are far from superfluous. Rather, it’s evident that Kristi revives the sound—which was predominantly represented by straight white men—in order to infuse it with her own life and experience as a Catholic school dropout and daughter of immigrants.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dark Hearts
    Annie broke out in the mid aughts with cheeky, indelible dance-pop like “Chewing Gum” and “Heartbeat,” but Dark Hearts luxuriates in an unapologetically moodier palette.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Serpentine Prison
    While Serpentine Prison may invoke familiar accusations of dullness, it’s refreshing to hear Berninger’s disaffected songwriting style take on a more grown-up perspective.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Savage Mode II
    It’s Metro, though, who elevates 21’s stories to something approaching greatness. ... This sequel is a ratification of the “bigger and better,” an example of steady improvement through impeccable craft.
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