KASMS

If you haven’t noticed Kasms hovering in your music peripherals, then it’s a wonder what parochial music world you’ve been living in.

So we advise you to kibosh the dreary elder statesmen you’re revisiting, the bore mongers and melancholic summer singer songwriters that reduce to an emotional mess and get your ears wrapped around the abrasive, sonorous intent of London quartet Kasms.

Still very much in their infancy, the bands myriad sound was one of bemusement for many a muso, and until the phrase “shriekbeat” was coined to describe their overwhelming sound. And frankly shriekbeat fits them like a proverbial glove. Their sound also leans towards the melodramatic indie chic murmurings that has had some people pondering whether Kasms may be hanging off the coat tails of fellow noiseniks such as Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man and Kristeen Young. But in truth, have they got such a eye catching front woman as Rachel Mary Callaghan? We think not…

Up front

Rachael Mary Callaghan (singer) has a refulgent shock of red hair, she stalks her stage like a monolithic character, that is, until you meet her day-to-day perky self in her more natural form: she is all together, quite endearing character and you have no reason to be afraid of her onstage alter-ego. She treads a thin line between the ear-piercing wails of Karen O and the witchy hawks of The Music’s Rob Harvey in her escalating pitch. And further in voice, she’s often changing cadence in her tone, bellowing her pristine and unflinchingly doomed vocals forthright.

And behind…

And it doesn’t stop there in the talent stakes; Rory Brattwell (drums, guitars, piano, synth) hails from the now defunct Test Icicles, to add his sordid past and guitar pedigree to the mix. The two previously worked together in what Callaghan describes as a “cool spazcore band, where we all wore masks”. Other band members; Gemma Fleet was in an all girl grunge band which she fronted and Scott R Walker, formerly of Om Fiahid played a montage of random ethnic instruments. With Walker, Fleet and Brattwell, the Kasms experience has them conquering foreign instruments, to what they comfortably played in their past bands. “It was a new evolving experiment and it was just a project between ourselves, we didn’t really expect it as serious as its got now but we’re glad its going this way,” points out Callaghan.

‘Spayed’

With this cauldron of creativity within the quartet, at near boiling point, it was no surprise that the opus debut album ‘Spayed’ was surprisingly finished in an unforgiving three day recording session. Something Callaghan later puts down to “the fact that some of the band have full time jobs still, so it was a bit of challenge, a fun Anneka‘s challenge.”

Fundamentally their debut ‘Spayed’ is a collective saucepan of their flavoursome influences, past band sounds, blending the record into a spasmodic, culturally hip, expressive- melodramatic-collage. The band herald American punk-rockers Sonic Youth as “Kasms family favourites” adding that there is definite “Sonic Youthisms in this album especially in Siren Sisters” and it all falls into place when you are exposed to it’s serrated riffery.

Still Callaghan reiterates that “it was never a conscious decision to sound like any other bands” with some of the songs going back to the first band practice. It was just the natural evolution of the band that they had a proclivity to latch on to familiar formulas that seemed ingrained in their make-up. Callaghan clearly states that ‘Spayed’ is “a document of their first recordings” and we think a damn good one at that.

With the album peppered with accliam, they then had the audible glory of supporting the Gossip on their European tour. Reminiscing of the first time she met Beth Ditto, Callaghan remarked that Ditto lured her by cheekily saying “come and sit on my knee” and then scribed on their dressing room Gossip © Kasms, to the delight of the beaming Callaghan. She also cements that she was in complete awe of the charismatic larger-than-life Ditto throughout the tour in which they played Paris, Amsterdam and London’s Scala.

Picturing the artistic calibre of Kasms at one of this years top festivals has become a reality. With them already played Offset and Leeds/Reading, we have our fingers tightly crossed that an increasing number of people are now tangled up in the noise abyss that so many have found themselves immersed and continually thrilled at.

Words by Ash Meikle

Photo by Ian Arnold