Six Sex Six

Kubla Khan is one of those bands that start off great but then take a pitdive near the end. Hailing from Spain, the band performs middle eastern tinged death thrash that actually sits well with listeners. At least for the short while they last. Their debut "Six Sex Six" opens with "Agrodeath" which has a great middle eastern guitar melody which gives the impression the album will be more than just a basic thrash death metal album right? Wrong! After a few seconds the thrash and death metal section comes in with semi catchy riffs, growled vocals that sound underproduced and a few solos that aren't exactly inspiring. Basically the music sounds like one of their demos all over again, just a little more interesting.

"Black Soul" has an good drum section before launching into the rapid blastbeat fire of the usual death/thrash hash. There isn't really much groove to this one as the group just hammers out riff after riff like on automatic pilot. "Storm From The Past" is the only other song to feature any sort of oriental or middle eastern influence before dissolving forever into the thrash metal. From this point on there's no more interesting melodies. No decent drum sections. Each track sounds like the last in all their fury and hammering glory but the problem is they don't really stand out or do anything memorable. The vocals, as brutal as they are, tend to get boring after a while being the same impossible-to-understand growls over and over. The speed of the band is impressive, but again, loses its magic as all it becomes is speed and not much rhythm or melody.

Kubla Khan should stick with their middle eastern influences and incorporate them more throughout their music rather than just in the beginning and then leaving the rest to the thrash death style. Look at bands like Melechesh and Nile; they got around to being some of the top middle eastern influenced metal bands because they kept their influences consistent, rather than heap them all into one place for two tracks and then leave the rest to sound like generic death or black metal. Kubla Khan would be much more interesting if they added more middle eastern variation to their music overall, instead of sounding completely generic and losing so many inspirational vibes they could have brought out with their namesake's heritage.

Written for www.brutalism.com