I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: March 5, 2025] Kassie Krut [rescheduled from November 9, 2024]

I saw The Spirit of the Beehive seven years ago and they were outstanding live.  Here it was all this time later and I was able to see them again.  The opening band was Kassie Krut who I’d never heard of. I looked them up and found out that Kassie Krut was formed from Palm!

The band was formed by Kasra Kurt, guitarist, who wanted to explore more electronic music and Eve Alpert (both of who are phenomenal guitarists but who play no guitars on the album).  They were joined by Matt Anderegg on drums.

Their EP is loud and dancey and fun, but very noisy.  And live they were noisy, noisy and more noisy.  As with Polo Perks, this may have been because I was so close to the stage.  But I believe that all of the sounds were coming from the overhead speakers (there were no guitar amps to have sound coming from the stage).  Whatever the case I absolutely could not hear Eve singing (except the quieter bits of Reckless) and I couldn’t hear Kasra at all when he took to the mic.

Matt was on my right playing an electronic drum kit,  It was fun to watch because the bass pedal was literally a pedal hitting a small pad, slightly larger than the pedal itself, but it was cavernously loud.  The rest of the pads that he played generated all kinds of percussive sounds.

On the far side was Kasra.  He was also hitting things with sticks.  I’m not sure what kind of gear he had, but he hit the same item in every song and it made a percussive sound.  I felt like his contributions were really small, as he seemed to be making the same noises in every song.  But perhaps I was missing something.

I have no idea what Eve was doing.  Maybe a synth?

For the last song, Kasra and Eve switched places and that’s when I realized that one of the things on Kasra’s table was a guitar lying flat.  I’m sure Kasra used it too, but when Eve was there, she repeatedly struck the strings with a drum stick and then used, I think, a slide, to make the sounds change.

So basically the set was pretty much all percussion.  It was really loud, really chaotic and rather disappointing.  If only because I loved Palm so much and was really hoping for a great set. Palm’s music was chaotic and complicated with interesting chords and melody lines.  And this was just a lot of percussion and crashes.  I don’t even really want to see them again from further back to see if I missed anything.

I thought I might be able to figure out a setlist from the clips I recorded, but I can’t.