The Beauty Witch presents
Kassie Krut
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Kassie Krut began as a solo act, its name impishly garbling that of its maker, Kasra Kurt, who otherwise served as a guitarist and vocalist in Palm. While the Philadelphia-based four-piece undertook bracing new adventures in guitar music, the side project was a venue for Kurt to indulge his taste for electronics and set stray ideas to simmer. When Palm called it quits in 2023, after ten years and three acclaimed albums, Kurt decamped to New York with Eve Alpert, the band’s co-guitarist and -vocalist, and Matt Anderegg, who had produced their last record. Playing together (in person and sometimes remotely), the longtime friends and collaborators christened a new, three-headed incarnation of Kassie Krut.
On their self-produced, self-titled debut EP, the group’s approach is deceptively simple. With a constrained palette and a penchant for repetition, they find a world of opposing textures and timbres: electric and acoustic, synthetic and organic, smooth and frictive, terrestrial and celestial. Their scratch-made sounds melodize the hard-edged noise of daily life—car alarms, notification chimes, dial tones, feedback—setting it against stutter-step high hats, pots-and-pans percussion, and tensile bass tones that thrash around in the head like a rubber ball. The industrial sensibility produces a sonic object with uncommon properties. It thins and thickens in our ears, tenses and softens, clots in one moment and evaporates in the next.
Alpert’s vocals are brash, triumphal, mordacious. On “Reckless,” she sing-spells the name of the band in the style of a playground taunt, (“If you ask me who I wanna be / Ima spell it out so it’s plain to see / K-A-S-S-I-E-K-R-U-T-T-T-T”), satirizing the lexicon of pop egoism while acknowledging its affective power. Here and elsewhere, the lyric sheet holds a series of affirmations equally suited for tonight’s disco or tomorrow morning’s mirror, though with odd artifacts of lived specificity. On “United,” Kurt takes a turn on the microphone in pitch-shifted falsetto, delivering a plaintive love song for wounded attachment. Even as the sounds of impossible instruments are labored over in minute detail, the group’s delivery maintains an air of detached playfulness, deploying a metallic, fun-house-mirror reflection of the contemporary pop idiom.
Kurt and Alpert spent their teenage years in London, whose streets and airwaves were suffused with the sounds of dub, grime, and garage. Those early encounters were soon joined by regard for SOPHIE’s candied hyperpop, Tirzah’s attitudinal minimalism, and DAF’s turn to electronic body music, which created the template by which punk would go electronic for the next forty years. After years of twisting rock instrumentation into unknown shapes, the first release by Kassie Krut represents a transformative refocusing of energies. These tracks evince the kind of wisdom that only comes from experience—and the kind of experience that can only be scored by new sounds, still glittering with the metal filings of their making.
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