Review Summary: Absolute clown band.
Have you ever listened to something and gotten secondhand embarrassment around the people who created it? Has there been a time where you hear something and think, “What could have compelled someone to conceptualize and materialize this?” That is the exact sentiment I get when listening to Hunt the Dinosaur.
A band that I was unfortunately targeted by via Instagram promoted ads (a decision by the algorithm that I continue to question to this day), I immediately had alarm bells ringing inside my tiny little brain. I heard about 10 seconds of an indecipherable song that they recently released and thought “Who the hell is this and why are they in my feed?” As a fan of heavy music, I decided to pull them up on Spotify and see if there was anything worthwhile there. Boy, what a mistake that was.
Hunt the Dinosaur’s “Dankasaurus” is, for lack of a better term, embarrassing (I mean, that album name should say enough). This band is the amalgamation of every element of metal, nu metal, and rap that people despise while being so self-righteous and braggadocious to the point of inducing nausea in the listener. Instrumentally, there is nothing offensive about them, however it does sound like they listened to a Rings of Saturn album and thought “Hey, we could do that!”. There is no organic feeling to anything on this album - simply carbon copies of tropes and trends from bigger (and frankly better) acts in the scene. Production is okay and the instrumentals are listenable, but there are a slew of bands out there doing the same sound to much better results.
Where this band loses me is the vocals. Absolute dogwater.
First, the vocal inflection across this whole thing is nightmarish. Generic deathcore squeals mixed in with the most unlistenable rap-screaming you can imagine. The sound of his voice mimics the sound I make when I wake up in the middle of the night congested with a frog in my throat. How anyone could gravitate towards this style is beyond me.
They approach lyrics with the “lyrical miracle spherical” strategy of using the most elementary rhyme schemes and verse structuring. The majority of the songwriting on here revolves around the vocalist boasting about how talented he is, how fast his flow is, how untouchable he is and how the haters can go *** themselves. Prime example on the song Destructo:
“To be completely honest, my flow is way to atomic
It's faster than sonic
It causes the people to vomit
I'm on another level
Put the pedal to the metal, I'm a nasty ***ing rebel that will never settle”
Yeah, this causes people to vomit, but not in the way you mean….
Also, these guys just casually drop f-slurs all over the place like it is nothing on multiple songs. Most of the diss-lyrics on this are ones I would have written in 5th grade thinking I was cool but in reality would be incredibly cringe. “DTF” is a song about exactly what you would imagine from the title but with zero nuance and an almost virgin-like quality to it. Also, see these lyrics from the song “Spaced Out”:
“Choke on your own entitlement
I create my own environment
You are nothing but an obstacle
That's in my way
But that won't stop me at all
You can't crush me when I'm made of ***ing steel
Why is it that you have so much to say
But never really do anything about it
I'll see your bitch ass some ***ing day and knock you straight the *** out”
This is the equivalent of if Andrew Tate wrote a deathcore record, or equal to Korn+Attila+Rings of Saturn conceiving a stillborn baby. *** this band. *** the vocalist specifically - nobody knows you, your band is trash, you aren't tough and you are a clown. This band is an embarrassment to music as a whole. Anyone supporting this type of slop should be ashamed of themselves. I listened to this album one time through months ago and it has still haunted me to this day. I cannot get the absolute horse*** that this album is out of my memories. If I were at a show and this band was opening for them, I would actively boo them. This *** is a disgrace.
