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
    • 50 Critic Score
    You're Nothing
    You're Nothing provides another solid 12 tracks of loud, bleak teenage ennui, but with a comparative lack of genre diversity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Earthly Delights
    The highlights demonstrate that these guys have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision, but by and large this is Lightning Bolt doing a Lightning Bolt album.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Out in the Storm
    After a while, Crutchfield's melodies also blend together, especially during the album's middle stretch, where the similar-sounding “Sparks Fly” and “Brass Beam” are sequenced back to back.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Canterbury Girls
    Canterbury Girls still succeeds at being Lily & Madeleine’s most personal and cohesive work to date, but the siblings too often seem as if they’re reluctant to let loose and lean into the music.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    IRM
    As a pairing between two artists, the album works, though not nearly as much as it could have if both were at the top of their game.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Director's Cut
    The reinterpretations offer interesting what-if scenarios, tweaking and altering familiar material, but inevitably reveal more about Bush's fussiness over her own legacy than anything else.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Hallucination
    At nearly 38 minutes, the album stays around long enough to where its effervescent nature starts to serve as a hindrance rather than a strength, where the age-old idiom of “in one ear and out the other” begins to ring truer than ever before.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Saturnalia
    They were probably aiming for hypnotic or dreamy, but except for the cinematic bookends 'The Stations' and 'Front Street,' the slow dances mostly crash-land in Snoresville
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beast Epic
    The sneaky-sounding arpeggios and the hushed, fragile vocal performances that defined albums like Our Endless Numbered Days are eschewed in favor of bright strumming and unbridled joyousness, rendering most of Beast Epic undeniably pretty but ultimately toothless. That's not to say Beast Epic doesn't sometimes explore hefty themes.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
    Ocean Blvd traffics in some nimble, effervescent melodies, a few memorable vocal passages, and the occasional tuneful duet (Father John Misty proves to be an exceptional bedfellow on “Let the Light In”). But the album feels more like a placeholder in Del Rey’s discography than a truly audacious chapter in the singer’s blossoming late-period reawakening.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bones of What You Believe
    While the album has its fair share of sweet spots, the handful of capable melodies never quite balances out its bizarre impulses or the utter lack of thematic unity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Twelfth
    “Confessional Boxing” offers mostly surface-level hints at the dark times of the past, as the song growls but doesn’t ever bite. Miller fares better when he’s in pure storytelling mode on the after-hours waltz “Belmont Hotel,” on which the titular hotel becomes a metaphor for romantic renewal.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fuse
    Even when Fuse is firing on all cylinders, it feels risk-averse, leaving one longing for an album that mines its gloomy outlook and ambiance for greater impact. As far as proverbial “comebacks” go, though, an exercise in pared-down style, where the music is a little darker, slower, and a bit more mature than what’s come before, is far from the end of the world.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Magic Numbers
    High, lovely harmonies notwithstanding, a good 15 minutes chopped could've meant the difference between merely being noticed and creating a minor masterpiece of nostalgia-infused pop.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cracker Island
    Much like 2017’s overstuffed Humanz, Cracker Island is, more times than not, overly indebted to its impressive list of guest stars, foregrounding their talents instead of employing them as natural extensions of Albarn’s musicianship.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Aquarius
    Interludes were employed on Janet's best albums to segue between an array of themes, genres, and tempos; here they're just used as atmosphere, to create the illusion of an album that's larger than the sum of its parts.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Center Won't Hold
    The Center Won’t Hold clocks in at just over a 30 minutes and lacks a certain spark—a song with the barn-burning intensity of “Entertain” or the heartrending emotion of “One More Hour.” In many places, these songs feel derivative in a way that the band’s music never has before.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Days Of Wonder
    It's easy enough to listen to the album as a whole, but roughly a third of the songs are clunkers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Twins
    Segall throws a lot of stuff against the wall to see what sticks, and not all of it does, but it's still impressive that he's capable of pumping out so much music in so many closely related veins without repeating himself.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Invisible Way
    Low has found what they do well and occasionally even exceed the standards they've set for themselves, but the stoicism and gradual build that comprises the band's best songs is at times defeated by their lyrical disinterest and repetition.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gigaton
    Pearl Jam has been locked in cruise control since the late ‘90s, and their latest, Gigaton, is largely more of the same.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    In Times New Roman...
    The best moments on In Times New Roman… prove that Queens of the Stone Age can still reliably deliver left-of-center alt-rock thrills, and Homme’s take-it-or-leave-it charisma is as tangible as it ever was. But after almost three decades of taking on every strand of rock music and embracing both the analog and the digital, it’s disheartening, if perhaps understandable, that the band seems unsure of where to go next.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Furr
    Furr is country-chic posturing that works from a distance: as twangy background music for those elites who watch their politics on MSNBC.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black Sea
    Black Sea is a headphone album, packed with fragile, briefly presented sounds that seem in constant danger of escaping unheard.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Animal Years
    Animal Years sounds unsettled: the arrangements are far too bombastic for this record's purposes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    True [EP]
    Even under a half hour, it still manages to wear itself out.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    II
    It's their densest and most detailed work to date, but without the cathartic spirit of their live shows (Gamelan was written largely in a live setting), II sounds stripped of the music's previous rapture.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Noble Beast
    Similar to witnessing Bird's high-wire concert act, in which he deftly loops figures from guitar, violin, and vocals to create living sound colleges of pop songs, one comes away from Noble Beast feeling more impressed than moved.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chromatica
    Whether muddling the creation of the universe with both love and fame (“Sine from Above”) or teasing the theory of the world as a simulation (“Enigma”), these songs only scratch the surface of deeper ideas before falling back on the most basic of pop clichés.
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