The Roman Numerals are a Kansas City based band that mixes dark trance music with 80’s dance beats. Unlike their stylistic contemporaries Interpol and Joy Division, The Roman Numerals manage to stay dark but avoid being mellow and dreary. Their music can either be seen as a goth kid’s dance music or club music that you would hear in a nightmare. Regardless of where it comes from, they mix both styles seamlessly. The band is made up of veteran Kansas City rockers whose former projects include Season to Risk (Thick records, if you’ve ever seen the movie “Strange Days”, they were the band performing in the Warehouse party scene), Dirtnap (Anodyne records), and Shiner (DeSoto records). Though they naturally have similar aesthetics to their former post-punk bands, The Roman Numerals is a lot cleaner sounding, avoiding the noisy guitar sludge and heavy use of electronics that helped define at least some of their former bands. Rather, the Roman Numerals formed with the intention of escaping the “Kansas City sound” which they helped create.

The band formed naturally after its members were involved in a Halloween show in a Joy Division cover band that was named after their first album, Unknown Pleasures. Though the show was only meant to be a one-time performance, it produced a very large and positive response that inspired Billy Smith, Steven Tulipana, Shawn Sherrill, and Pete LaPorte to start writing songs together. The result was The Roman Numerals.

The members of the Roman Numerals have more influence on the Kansas City music scene than just the bands they have played in and songs they have written, they also have their own bar. In 2005, Steve Tulipana and Shawn Sherrill bought an Irish pub on the outskirts of Kansas City, remodeled it, renamed it the Record Bar, and now house local and national bands almost every night of the week. Not necessarily just a rock club, they opened the bar to help support local businesses and give people a cool bar to go hang out at. Outside of owning the bar, they did most of the renovations by themselves, they designed the Italian-based menu themselves (all menu items are music-themed, for example, the Jackson 5 antipasto dish), and band-member Billy Smith does all of the booking.

While doing this, the band finished recording their first album, which will be self-titled and released on Anodyne Records. The album was produced by Paul Malinowski, a skilled producer who has recorded for The Life and Times, Shiner, and Open Hand.

The song “Can We Trust Your Architect?” will be the first video for Roman Numerals. The video is a stop-motion animation that was compiled from 2,242 individually edited photographs taken from many different angles as the band performed the song live. Voted one of the favorite live acts in 2005 by the Kansas City Star, their music video captures the energy of their live show while providing an excellent example of the band’s studio sound.
The Roman Numerals have taken all of their experience from their past bands to bring new knowledge to an old sound, pushing the music forward into a style that is unique and intriguing. Not too dancy and pop oriented a la The Killers, and not too dark and mellow, the Roman Numerals have crafted a sound that will undoubtedly influence other bands of this style. More importantly, they’ve crafted a sound that will have crowds leaving satisfied from a night of dancing to well-constructed music.