KUBLAI KHAN – Exhibition of Prowess

vote
8.0

• Band:
  KUBLAI KHAN
• Duration: 00:23:56
• Available from: 20/09/2024
• Label:

• Rise Records

In what is probably their career peak, a couple of years after the substantial EP “Lowest form of Animal”, Kublai Khan take the leash off their monstrous fifth studio album.
When many bands work to broaden and expand their sound, studying production and adding variations and influences, the Texans voluntarily take the opposite path, proceeding by subtraction: fewer notes, open chords, simple structures, straight drums and cacophonous, gnashed, dirty screams. An increasingly heavy hammer, which pounded on the anvil dictating the rhythm for the massacre in the pit.
In the wake of “The Guilty Dog”, “The Hammer”, “Boomslang” and the explicit previews “Theory of Mind” and “Low Tech”, the album trims all the excess fat, summarizing the quartet’s songwriting strengths, as is evident in the bitter and desolate “Mud”, which talks about trauma and its devastating consequences, or in “972”, focused on the struggle to overcome one’s difficulties and find the strength to move forward.
On other occasions, the band recovers the most appreciated solutions of their repertoire simply throwing listeners raw hymns to destruction, among which “Darwinism” and “Cannibal” stand out. The important guest appearances of Dave Peters (Throwdown) and Jamie Jasta (Hatebreed) are exploited to give a couple of songs a more strictly hardcore flavor, varying minimally the systematic demolition that follows from song to song.
Finally, comes the long-awaited “Antpile 2”, which continues the tradition of songs that are just over a minute long, useful for simply venting or, as the title suggests, a pure 'demonstration': practically a long breakdown interspersed with lacerating artificial harmonics, forming the basis for a text composed of a single word.
In twenty-five minutes of pure impact, Kublai Khan manage to communicate an innate sense of substance, hitting the mark in proving that “less is more.”
An ideal continuation of the work of Bury Your Dead and Emmure, but with the serious and ruthless vision of Harm's Way, as never before the band has managed to produce. Brutal and suffocating, but at the same time primal and violent to the point of exhilarating. “Exhibition of Prowess” is the force of a primate in the proud and rural context of Texas.