Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 3,122 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: 1,692 out of 3122
  2. Mixed: 1,319 out of 3122
  3. Negative: 111 out of 3122
3122 music reviews
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    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sing the Delta
    Sing the Delta... conveys a one-of-a-kind perspective that, somehow, manages to be as unassuming and humble as it is powerful and authoritative.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood
    The world Cale has created here is conflicted and weird, but it's also fascinating.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Centralia
    Centralia is the most sophisticated and cultivated Mountains album to date.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    M B V
    A few twists and turns shy of perfection, m b v is the innovation and sonic warmth of My Bloody Valentine rekindled and made anew.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Push the Sky Away
    In Push the Sky Away, an album of thrilling darkness pierced by moments of brilliant light, Cave may have crafted his defining statement.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    People, Hell and Angels
    People, Hell and Angels offers the clearest sense yet of how Hendrix was preparing an evolution of his own.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dungeonesse
    The group's music is far more pointed and focused when she's standing at its center, proving that it's not just the parts (polished and hummable though they may be), but Wasner's transformative presence that ultimately sets Dungeonesse apart from the rest of the '90s-mining pack.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Once I Was an Eagle
    For its cohesive tone and the ease with which it plumbs the darkest recesses of Marling's consciousness, Once I Was an Eagle is close to a masterpiece, a heavenly composition with just enough hell to keep things from feeling too familiar.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Slave Vows
    It is hardcore, a visceral distillation of fury that aims to wound.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Warp & Weft
    Warp & Weft is Veirs's most expansive effort yet, with obvious musical and thematic ties to experimental Americana.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Reflektor
    The band certainly hasn't left rock behind, but they've found a way to push beyond a sense of exhaustion with the resources that the genre has to offer, while at the same time reflecting on the tenuousness of interpersonal connection in an age of hyper-evolving technology.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son
    The singer's delivery is more pliant than it's ever been, moving from the hushed echo-chamber whispers of "Silver Malcolm" to the fuzzed-out shouts of "Jericho Road." But the real magic is in the melancholy appeal of his daydream, what he calls his "temporary Earth" in "Magic Number," and the persistent possibility of revelation that Jurado catalogues with grim bravado and wry hope.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    St. Vincent
    Her guitar may be her primary tool for shaking up and complicating otherwise strictly defined songwriting, but Clark's voice remains the thing that defines her material, the glittering lynchpin of the glorious, ever-expanding world she's created.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Present Tense
    Present Tense possesses a complexity that's not so calculated, focusing on the passage of music rather than layer upon layer of sound. Its 11 synth-drenched tracks are more bare than those on Smother, but they move much more fluidly, their liquiform seduction establishing a contrast with the band's ominous lyrics.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Lese Majesty
    They work fully as standalone tracks, but feel even more substantial when taken within the overall structure of this beguiling, addictive album, which finally turns this strange duo's intellectual eccentricity into their greatest asset.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    I Love You, Honeybear
    It's a rare fulfillment of outsized ambition and a crystallization of Tillman's inimitable narrative verve, however unreliable his narrator may be.
    • 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.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    To Pimp A Butterfly
    Tidy this album isn't, but like There's a Riot Goin' On or the distended jams of One Nation Under a Groove, the uncompromising messiness is the point. The focused and fervent anger, politics, cosmic knowledge, and above all unshakable self-doubt is the point too.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Carrie & Lowell
    If The Age of Adz harnessed Stevens's limpid melodies to crashing electronica, Carrie & Lowell finds that electronic experimentation sublimated, emerging primarily in the album's timing, which, like a click track, is more precise and mechanical than anything on Stevens's purely folk efforts.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Ghosts of Highway 20
    The Ghosts of Highway 20 is otherwise characterized by its consistency, but what really sets it apart from Williams's previous album is its sense of emotional balance.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Will
    Will's coup is how it keeps one guessing, and how Barwick keeps from relying on the beautiful yet impersonal sonic washes of her past work. It's the sound an artist, whose mysterious and celebrated process has ironically created theatrical and curated work to this point, finally achieving subtlety.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mykki
    A pop debut of disciplined eccentricity and disarming force.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Skeleton Tree
    While it may not be Cave's most accessible album, owing both to the experimental nature of much of the music and the fact that its level of emotional rawness makes it a legitimately uncomfortable listen in places, it may very well be his best.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    American Band
    The band displays a new level of clear-eyed purpose and here-and-now urgency on American Band. Eloquently plainspoken as ever about the pressing issues we face as a nation, they’ve made an album multiple decades into their career that establishes them as more directly relevant than ever.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Oczy Mlody
    What makes Oczy Mlody so enthralling is that the Flaming Lips are ambitious in their exploration of the aftermath of their typical spectacle.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Order of Time
    A triumph of form, The Order of Time is through and through a completely idiosyncratic take on American roots music, steeped in its tradition but not beholden to it.
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