Kde volume control

I've done a fresh install of Debian/Testing on a new laptop and the volume control buttons aren't working. They make no apparent difference to the volume and no change to the volume settings according to alsamixer. It seems that the backend is "Phonon VLC". Is it possible to have KDE use ALSA directly without such things? Is there another desktop environment that has a more minimalist design without being like TWM? I want something that has notifications for USB devices, battery, network manager, etc but not too much else in the way of trying to take over everything and not having a process like plasmashell taking 10% of a CPU core when nothing is happening. -- Sent from my Huawei Mate 9 with K-9 Mail.