“Vibe is a quintessential element in what I’m going for,” says Menahan Street Band co-founder, multi-instrumentalist and producer Thomas Brenneck. “Vibe, mood and emotion.”
Those three elements are all over The Crossing, the second full-length offering from The Menahan Street Band, and the follow-up to 2008’s oft-sampled Make The Road By Walking. From the opening drum roll of the ominous title track, through the final burst of wah-wah guitar on the closing “Ivory and Blue,” The Crossing takes you on a cinematic instrumental journey through a nocturnal landscape of moods and emotions, propelled by funky, hip-hop-influenced grooves and dream-like horn and keyboard melodies. Despite The Menahan Street Band’s deep connections to the Brooklyn soul scene — The MSB backed Charles Bradley on his acclaimed 2011 album No Time For Dreaming, and its members have played and recorded with Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Antibalas, The El Michels Affair and The Budos Band, to name a few — The Crossing isn’t soul music per se… it’s more like “dark night of the soul” music.
“I recorded a lot of it from midnight until the sun came up, all the weird synthesizers and slide guitar,” says Brenneck, who crafted The Crossing at Dunham Sound Studios, the all-analog recording studio he built in Brooklyn with Menahan Street Band drummer and co-founder Homer Steinweiss. Recorded over a period of nearly two years, The Crossing is a sonic testament to the fruitful creative relationship that exists between Brenneck, Steinweiss, bassist Nick Movshon, trumpeter Dave Guy and tenor saxophonist Leon Michels, the five of whom have been playing together in one project or another since the early 2000s, when they were all members of The Dap-Kings.
“Originally MSB was just about us wanting to make some music for ourselves that was outside of the tight-knit formula of the music we were playing in the Dap-Kings and Antibalas, and wanting to embrace the fact that we grew up on hip-hop and classic rock,” says Brenneck.
“There’s a freedom to that, that you sometimes lose when you get too formulaic, or too locked into everybody playing what they’re ‘supposed’ to play,” he concludes. “And that freedom is so vital to the sound of Menahan, to the songwriting, and everything else.”
Listen back to Boss Action with Miss Goldie for a live set from Menahan Street Band.
