Pitch change sounds awful

I’m creating sound sound effects, one in particular is an explosion. In years past I was able to add some kick drum samples pitched down and mixed with a couple of explosion sfx recordings for a very solid bomb sfx. That was with Pro Tools. In trying the same pitch change in Cubase Elements 9 the kick drum samples just sound like wet paper bags being squashed when pitching down even half an octave. Is there a better way to do this in Cubase? The kick drum samples I’ve used are both from the Cubase library as well as just off the web kick drum wav files but the results are the same.

Thanks for any suggestions

The results highly depend on the source material used…