CKRAFT — Epic Discordant Vision (review)

CKRAFT — Epic Discordant Vision album cover

Album · 2022 · Avant-garde Metal

4.5/5 · 2023-07-11
siLLy puPPy

Jazz-rock fusion has been a thing since the 1960s but in recent years the energy and angst has increased substantially with a whole host of extreme metal bands tackling the jazz-fusion thing and thus jazz metal is no longer just metal with jazzy chord progressions but rather a bonafide marriage of instrumentation. In recent years many bands including Imperial Triumphant and Sarmat have taken the sounds laid out by Gordian Knot and Spastic Ink and run away with it. The Parisian CKRAFT ( not sure if it’s pronounced KRAFT or SEE KRAFT) is the latest band to deliver a heavy tech metal djent sound fortified jazzy accompaniments. Just looking at the instrumentation will tell you this band is different than the legion of traditionalists. In addition to the expected guitar, bass and drums, CKRAFT employs not only a tenor saxophone but takes things further with some French folk flavors via the augmented accordion!

EPIC DISCORDANT VISION is the band’s 2022 debut and lives up to its title fairly successfully. The band does deliver an epic overarching journey into the world of jazz metal all the while fueling the journey with a Messhugah like discordant chugging session. Like many jazz-fusion bands of yore, CKRAFT’s debut is an all instrumental affair with virtuosic passages providing the proper mood setting metal angst and what makes it all the more intriguing is the use of Medieval sounding melodies that yields a bizarre crossroads of the olden days with a fresh new extreme metal sound. This five piece’s debut features ten exhilarating tracks that add up to about 51 minutes in running time. It’s hard to believe this band exists due to Charles Kieny’s love of the accordion but tracks like “Bug Out!” will leave you in disbelief as you hear him shred where normally a guitar would be whizzing up and down the scales!

Comparisons to bands like Gojira and Messhugah have been made but in all honesty CKRAFT hits a home run on its debut and really finds its own voice the first time around. While jazz provides the compositional fortitude, the metal instrumentation sets the pace with fiery crunch riffs and perfect unison energetic deliveries of the guitar, bass and drums. The Medieval accordion sounds add a unique twist that on paper sounds like a very bad idea but somehow this young band pulls it off with seeming ease at that. For the duration of EPIC DISCORDANT VISION, this team of five musicians doesn’t stumble once as each track unfolds perfectly with all the tracks connecting to the other. The band has mastered not only the jazz and metal fusion but has also provided the perfect contrast of dynamics, tone manipulation, tempo variations and transitions from one mood to the other. In other words this album is flawless.

Perhaps the most unique feature of this band is by far the augmented accordion which is a standard accordion that is played directly into synthesizers and the equivalent of a guitar pedal or preset on a keyboard. Upon first listen i did not realize that i was hearing an accordion but once i discovered exactly what was going on here i was all the more impressed the ingenuity and creative inclusion of this most unmetal of instruments! When all is said and done EPIC DISCORDANT VISION is a brilliant slice of jazz metal that doesn’t deviate from what one would consider as such but adds enough twists and turns to make it relevant in the burgeoning metal market of the third decade of the 21st century. While this was love at first listen, all the details only have allowed this one to grow on me and when all is said and done, this is really a modern metal masterpiece on many fronts! An exciting new band that will surely expand beyond this debut. My kinda wild raucous ride! Bravo!