Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,121 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: 1,691 out of 3121
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3121
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3121
3121 music reviews
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    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Traditional Techniques
    Traditional Techniques is less a revealing personal statement than a change of palette, with the singer-songwriter coloring his usual sarcastic wit with somber, muted tones.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Miss Anthropocene
    The result is a challenging exploration of the conflicting boundaries and boundlessness of personhood, technology, and society.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    color theory
    A sense of maturity binds the album’s best moments.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Surrender Your Poppy Field
    Surrender Your Poppy Field proves he’s deepening rather than merely proliferating his music, continuing to grow up instead of growing old.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mercy
    Overall, Mercy doesn’t quite measure up to the band’s stellar triptych of albums released between 2012 and 2014, on which they stretched to expand their repertoire, challenging themselves to explore various sounds from throughout the history of rock while refining their chops and chasing wild hares. Mercy boasts a few moments of exploration but seems more staid in its ambitions.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Changes
    There’s a weightlessness to it that seems to signify the slipping of a long-held burden from Bieber’s shoulders. His most personal offering to date, the album feels like a reflection of actual experience as opposed to a projection of a fantasy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hotspot
    Hotspot is stuffed with both instantly infectious melodies and lyrics that flaunt the Pet Shop Boys’s fierce intellect. Eternally sly postmodernists Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are at their funniest here, embedding bouncy synths with barbs directed at failing political institutions across the globe (their own kind of hotspot), social hypocrisies, and even themselves.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Unraveling
    It’s perhaps their most confrontational, challenging effort to date, an intricate work that’s more a reflection of than an antidote to the darkness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    High Road
    Those mottled sounds make High Road Kesha’s least consistent album to date, at least sonically. But there’s a clear emotional through line. ... With High Road, Kesha has found a way to double back and carve out a comfortable, if not happy, middle ground.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Have We Met
    Bejar the enigmatic, drunken poet has for several Destroyer albums now taken a back seat to Bejar the singer and bandleader. And while the singing on Have We Met remains tastefully restrained, lyrically there are glimpses of the younger, brasher Bejar here.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Manic
    It’s this refusal to pick a lane that’s precisely what makes Halsey’s third album, Manic, her most compelling effort to date.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rare
    Rare continually teases intriguing forays into leftfield pop, but so many of the album’s experiments come off as just that, without ever crystallizing with memorable hooks.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Disagree
    I Disagree is decidedly “post-genre,” tossing Poppy’s pop aesthetic into the shredder with heavy metal and industrial rock, previously only hinted at on the tail end of 2018’s Am I a Girl? “Concrete” shifts abruptly between tempos and genres, between commercial jingles and Beatles-esque chamber-pop, all shot through with roaring electric guitar riffs. That might sound incoherent, but it serves as a bold, deftly executed mission statement.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Making a New World
    An ambitious concept album about the aftermath of World War I. Even if you don’t feel the need to follow along with their historical lyrics, these 19 short songs are an entertaining, unpredictable listen.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Heavy is the Head
    Stormzy sounds more natural than most in his oscillation between the streetwise rude boy and the silky lover man. ... There are a few clunkers on this overstuffed album.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Fine Line
    Fine Line is very much a document of a 25-year-old deep in the process of figuring out not just what kind of musician he wants to be, but what kind of person. The path from cookie-cutter boy-band member to bona fide rock star is one fraught with a lot to prove both personally and publically, and yet it’s one Styles seems to be navigating with an eagerness to learn, to experience and to experiment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hyperspace
    Beck’s 2006 album The Information is a better example of his unrivaled funhouse approach to style and tone: By blending techno, folk, punk, hip-hop, Krautrock, blues, ambient, and groove-oriented rock, that album is by turns strange, aggressive, hilarious, disturbing, eerie, and fun, all while expressing wry dismay over our current cyber-Armageddon. In comparison, and for all its apparent now-ness, Hyperspace feels inconsequential and incomplete.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Courage
    In terms of both its length and themes, the 20-track Courage can feel exhausting, alternating between platitudes about grief and self-empowerment that, with only a few exceptions, make what should feel cathartic sound empty and even anonymous.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Our Pathetic Age
    As is frequently the case with double albums padded with filler, Out Pathetic Age’s biggest problem is that too much of it feels disposable, anodyne, or tossed off. But Shadow still manages to get some strong work out of both himself and his guests, and he deserves credit for not trying to merely recreate the same trick over and over.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Made a Place
    Oldham’s albums as Bonnie “Prince” Billy always achieve a cohesiveness that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts, and I Made a Place is no exception.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Wildcard
    While the latter half of Wildcard constitutes a bit of a shuffled deck of genres, there’s enough of a kick to the album as a whole to warrant its title, and Lambert certainly has the chops to sell it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jesus Is King
    There are flashes of genius throughout, moments that insinuate where Kanye could go next with his music. In a sense, the album’s modest pleasures play to its (intended) message, which is supposed to be one of human fallibility and the prospect of improving oneself. But Kanye is eventually going to have to confront the serious limitations that his faith is putting on the range of his art’s expression.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sweating the Plague
    While welcome, a more ambitious sound may very well soon make way for another round of succinct instant-classics like the recent “Cohesive Scoops” and “The Rally Boys.” For now, it’s worth appreciating this exciting outlier and a Guided by Voices that can be led triumphantly into uncharted water by its intrepid captain.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sexorcism
    Disappointingly one-note.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Leaving Meaning.
    Leaving Meaning is a piece of blood-spattered Americana, a haunted-house version of the fabled American dream. But while Gira is a clever musician, that doesn’t make the world he’s created here a pleasant one to visit.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fibs
    The songwriting on FIBS is just as experimental as the arrangements, at least on the album’s first two-thirds. ... f there’s a dip in momentum, it starts at FIBS’s most conventional song, “Limpet,” which follows a more typical guitar-rock arrangement. Downtempo tracks like “Ribbons” and “Unfurl” also suffer in comparison to the album’s richer, bolder experiments.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Colorado
    Its highs—vintage Crazy Horse guitar workouts, a small handful of charmingly intimate ballads—are intermittently marred by the same sort of problems that have characterized Young’s recent solo work. This includes particularly tuneless vocals and a tendency toward clunky, Facebook uncle-level environmentalist and political ranting.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Juice B Crypts
    Juice B Crypts occasionally threatens to collapse beneath the weight of its overstuffed songs. But even when it’s too maximalist for its own good, Battles’s music is still compelling. That’s thanks in large part to Stainer’s mind-meltingly good drum work.
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