Vicky
I was convinced that this band’s name was “Borginator”, so trying to find them on Google was not even slightly fun. Anyhow, this review is for all those of you who like Death Metal, fun, and doing questionable things, like smoking weed. Actually, there was this person on Reddit who said that Bonginator has “great songs, stupid lyrics, ’80s style intros.” And that pretty much sums it all up. How? Let’s find out.
I don’t know what kind of Mary Jane the guys were on when writing these tracks, but things are pretty weird. The album doesn’t make much sense, there are many times when someone is talking but you can’t really understand what they’re saying, since it’s all pretty distorted and they abuse the synthesizer. The main conceptual idea of it all seems to be smoking weed while fighting blood-thirsty aliens and travelling the universe. Don’t ask me how they’re planning on travelling the universe. If I didn’t want to look up the lyrics for the new Argesk album, with Bonginator I feel like if I do search the lyrics, things won’t get much clearer. And we could also get banned for use of drugs. I mean gruds. I mean… You get what I mean.
In general, I wouldn’t call Retrodeath such a bad album, but I wouldn’t say it’s great either. I feel like the band is trying a little too hard to combine two genres that don’t mix that well together: Synthwave and Stoner/Brutal/Death Metal. They do have guests though, and that is like a ray of sunshine in a cloud of green. So, for instance, on “Pizza Time”, they perform alongside Vince Castellano from Belushi Speed Ball, on “Short A** Bus”, they play with “Big A** Truck” and Ignominious, meanwhile “Intruder Organism” features Fulci, and the “Outro” is played with Tim Capello.
As expected, I did end up looking the lyrics to “Short A** Bus”, and here is the part that might resonate with you if you’ve made it this far into the article: Step off the brakes, kid, we ain’t gonna stop/What the […] is insurance? For more context, I recently discovered that Bonginator goes on tours in a converted yellow school bus. And here is another fun fact: it seems that the band has started its own festival, called The New England Death Metal Fun Time Bonanza (for more interesting details, click on this link).
To conclude, I am sure that Bonginator has a bright future ahead, there will always be people who like stoner music (this all pretty much began with Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill making “I Love You Mary Jane”, for the Judgement Night soundtrack, remember?). But I feel like the music just doesn’t resonate with me. To spare you the suspense, I won’t carry this review any further, even though we could still find ground to cover. If the next Bonginator album doesn’t have so many spoken passages, I’m sure it’ll get a higher score. Just not from me, because I’m 90% sure I’ll never listen to this band again. Looking forward to its next LP!
Label: Testimony Records
Release date: October 24, 2025
Website (the colorful Bandcamp): https://bonginator.bandcamp.com/
Country: USA
Score: 1.5/5.0 (sorry!!)
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