Livemusic.fm

“I think subversion is probably the most important thing an artist can do,” says Hank Sullivant, the dangerous mind behind Kuroma.

Kuroma has already blown brains online with their debut recording, Paris, a remarkable bouquet of ear-catching heavy melodies spanning a multitude of musical genres, from prog rock to power pop to bleary-eyed psychedelic soul. Like Todd Rundgren, Beck, or Sullivant’s personal heroes, Martin Rev and Alan Vega of Suicide, Kuroma freely takes established pop norms and bends them to his will, distorting and deconstructing music and meaning until they become something altogether more provocative. Case in point: Kuroma’s new single from Green Label Sound, the summery bubblegum of “In New York, Everything Is Tropical.” As with so much of the best rock ‘n’ roll, the track has its roots in the bedroom.

“It’s the first song I ever dreamt,” Sullivant explains. “The dream was really great – I was parasailing in Miami, and the boat underneath me was playing this No Doubt song that I’d never heard before. I was really enjoying it – and I don’t like No Doubt! Then I woke up and I remembered the whole thing. I had dreamt the whole song, and just immediately transcribed it with no problem at all. The chorus was about Miami, but since I don’t know anything about Miami, I ended up writing it about New York. So it’s this whole mutilation of No Doubt, where it’s subverting these commercial identities while also celebrating them.”

To give the track a proper radio-friendly sheen, Kuroma brought in master mixer Rich Travali, famed in record company corridors for his work with such superstars as Jay-Z, Britney Spears, Pharrell, and oh yes, Gwen Stefani. As a result, “In New York, Everything Is Tropical” is that most insidious of double agents – the saboteur which wreaks havoc from within.

“It sounds like mainstream music, but it’s definitely not that,” Sullivant says proudly. “It’s pretty weird.”

Sullivant spent much of his Memphis youth as a tennis brat, with a childhood interest in music that extended as far as the Monkees and Amy Grant. In 1991, he caught the bug from one of the year’s biggest radio hits, “Two Princes,” by the Spin Doctors. His dad did the right thing and brought young Hank to see the band in concert at Memphis’ Mud Island River Park. Young Hank was unimpressed.

“They were horrible,” he recalls. “They played this one song for like 30 minutes before they even got to the song I liked. So I was really angry after leaving that.”

Nevertheless, he found himself drawn to rock ‘n’ roll. He bought In Utero the week of its release and was hooked. Before long his tennis racket was replaced by a guitar. He joined his first band in his junior year in high school, the woefully monikered Accidental Mersh. Sullivant shared guitar/vocal duties with Andrew VanWyngarden, while Kuroma bassist Nick Robbins and Charlie Gerber (now gainfully employed as Communications Assistant to Tennessee Congressman Steve Cohen) filled out the line-up. The band’s “Adderall-influenced pop-jam-funk” was inspired by, of all things, Phish. Though he no longer holds the band in such high regard, Sullivant still acknowledges a certain admiration for their free-wheeling approach towards music.

“They invented on the fly,” he says. “They’d switch it up, doing different setlists and different types of jams. They would always interest themselves, which is why they had such an interested audience. It didn’t get old for people.”

In 2001, Sullivant headed off to the University of Georgia in Athens where he met Parker Gispert and Julian Dorio and formed The Whigs. Despite his having never having played the instrument, Sullivant assumed bass duties in the raucous rock trio. While recording the Whigs’ acclaimed 2005 debut, Give ‘Em All A Big Fat Lip, he became intensely involved in arrangements and overdubs, work which he found more satisfying than anything he’d done so far.

“It was really invigorating,” he says. “I just got creatively juiced and I started making songs that didn’t make any sense with The Whigs.”

Sullivant soon recorded a number of “hazed-out, psychedelic-influenced” demos with producer/engineer Billy Bennett (Drive-By Truckers, Patterson Hood, Dead Confederate), including a number of tracks which would ultimately find their way onto Paris. Having discovered his own artistic voice, Sullivant became intent on creating music as Kuroma, a name he adopted partially as homage to his favorite writer, Franz Kafka.

“A lot of his protagonists are named ‘K,” he says, “so I liked having a band that started with the letter K. And I just thought it looked and sounded cool. It didn’t really have anything to do with anything, I just loved the feel of it.”

Though The Whigs toured nearly non-stop after ATO Records re-released Give ‘Em All A Big Fat Lip in 2006, Sullivant yearned to be back in his Athens home studio.

“I always played as hard as I could,” he says, “but when your head gets like that, your life turns into this beige color. I think I knew the whole time what I needed to do.”

Sullivant left The Whigs during the band’s holiday break, revitalizing his creative juices by recording further Kuroma tracks. In the spring, a call came from his old friend and bandmate Andrew VanWyngarden, inviting him to move up to New York to play some summer tour dates with his exuberant psych-pop outfit, MGMT.

“I thought I’d practice with them in May and then leave in August or September,” Sullivant says. “The point was, why not? I get to go live in New York, I don’t want to get a job right now. That summer was one of the best times of my life, it was so fun.”

As it turned out, MGMT didn’t start touring until October, and while Sullivant loved playing with the band, he found himself itching to return to making music on his own. He finally pulled the plug in March 2008 and immediately went home to Athens, where he resumed focus on Kuroma, now officially comprising drummer Ben DuPriest and his high school bandmate, bassist Nick Robbins. Kuroma posted Paris online, opting to bypass such obvious routes as MySpace, decrying its rigid aesthetic as “almost fascist.” Rather, he created his own kuromamusic.com, preferring to stream Paris with minimal art or information, allowing his extraordinary music to do the talking.

Paris is that rare work that manages to be both adventurous and inventive while never sacrificing accessibility for the sake of willful ambiguity. Tracks like the stunning “I Am The Rat” (with its over-the-top guitar workout) and the epic “Beneath The Winds That Lash Neptune's Blue Skies Falls A Hard Rain Of Diamonds” gleefully traverse genres like bombastic AOR, lysergic soul, and arena-friendly alt-rock to create kaleidoscopic modern pop without boundaries or limits.

“It’s really free and playful,” Sullivant says, “but also very focused.”

While a lifetime of listening informs every note, Sullivant took specific inspiration from a series of compilations, the self-explanatory Eccentric Soul and Love, Peace & Poetry, a mind-bending collection of obscure international psychedelia. What he loved most was how the artists gathered onto these sets seemed to lack all identity, with nothing but the tunes to create magic and mystery in the listener.

“When I’m listening to those records, I don’t know what the bands’ faces looked like or what they did after their records sank,” he says. “That’s what a lot of the intention for Paris was. I wanted it sound like it was coming from obscurity, like ghosts singing to you.”

Which isn’t to say Sullivant craves anonymity – far from it, in fact. Having been out of the spotlight for much of his career, he is now eager to come forward and allow Kuroma and Paris to reach a wider audience than it’s already found thus far.

“I want people to hear Paris,” he says proudly. “I don’t want it to sink into obscurity. But the next album is the one where I fuck everything up.”