You’re a founding member of The Whigs, this catchy-ass band from Athens, and on the cusp of signing to a major record deal, you leave.
Weird, but OK.
Then your high school buddy Andrew calls, and says, “Hey, tour with my band.” You do, and during that time the band, MGMT, becomes an international hit. You’re atop the mountain.
And …you leave. Again. Hank Sullivant: Are. You. Crazy. Are you afraid of success?
“No, that’s stupid,” Sullivant said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t mind being the biggest thing in the world. I would love that. I just wanted to do my own thing and be extremely careful to do it the right way.”
If The Whigs was college, and MGMT was graduate school, then Kuroma is Sullivants job, and he’s quite happy thankyouverymuch.
An outfit with a rotating crew to go with its sundry of sounds, Kuroma boasts an album (Paris) and strategy (no MySpace) seeking to engage, not pander.
“The goal is to have some aspect of you other people have to find out about and not you desperately seeking attention,” Sullivant said. “That turns me off to a lot of bands nowadays. A lot of them don’t have any nerve.”
With a whole lot of pluck and a little bit of patience, Sullivant now finds plenty of people seeking him out. In January the band supported Cold War Kids at New York’s Mercury Lounge (“Awesome. I told myself I’d never use that word again unless describing mountains,” Sullivant said.
In March, the band has a half-dozen dates opening for Primal Scream, while April has Kuroma embarking on an extensive tour with Starfucker (“It was fun telling my mom that,” he said).
Hank Sullivant, meet mountain. Again.
“After the careful starting out approach, things are rolling,” Sullivant said. “The plan is to become the best band in the world.”
Sullivant’s path to Kuroma is an amalgamation of elements starting in Memphis with a guy named Andrew Van Wyngarden.
Now one-halt of MGMT, Van Wyngarden and Sullivant then flexed their musical muscles in a funk band, a genre that doesn’t reward poor playing. “It was important to be incredible at our instruments,” Sullivant notes.
Upon graduation, the two diverged. While Van Wyngarden started playing “subversive Cyndi Lauper kind of stuff” while singing to recorded tracks, Sullivant came to Athens to attend UGA and share in the town’s musical wealth.
At first, he was underwhelmed.
“I was unimpressed mainly because of the musicianship, he said. “I saw a couple of bands, and my first reaction was it was pathetic and wimpy. I knew there could be music that could stomp on it.”
With Parker Gispert and Julian Dorio, stomp he did.
The Whigs were a revelation, pounding pop gems to SRO crowds. It was here Sullivant grasped the power of pop structure.
“And the bass,” Sullivant said. “I never played bass before. I would have left Georgia if I hadn’t met Parker and Julian. Back then, the songs I wrote were all over the place, and Julian and Parker have a keen sense of pop structure. The big thing with The Whigs was we were young and wanted to stomp other Athens bands. That was part of the energy.”
“With MGMT, I admired the way Ben (Goldwasser) think about music. Moving to New York and playing with them was eye-opening. And Ben shared music that has messed everything up in my head. I don’t know what’s good or bad anymore.”
Seeing where Sullivant’s been makes it easy to understand where Kuroma’s going; he did his own thing by piecing everything he loves with everything he learns. Paris tracks prove this, revealing chunks of funk (“Paris”), pop (“Searching For A Sheep”), playfulness (“Alexander Martin”), and grunge (“May Be Im Lazy” — “Kurt Cobain is amazing,” Sullivant adds), while not making any effort to conceal its origins.
“People are copying each other but trying to hide it,” Sullivant said. “With Kuroma we’re copying people blatantly, absolutely stealing and doing nothing to cover it up. It’s trying to introduce elements you’ve heard a zillion times and repackaging it in a different context. It’s making things hyper-real, truer than they were.”
Sounds like this time he’s staying.
