Photo Credit: Noah Meltzer
Luis Santana admits that his memory might exaggerate things, but he recalls his band auditioning as many as 30 singers before finding the right one. “We had guys coming in for literally almost four years,” he says. “This was when the BBC was still up, and we were practicing above the BBC, and we had singer after singer come in. I don’t think we knew exactly what we were looking for, but singers would come in and even if they could really sing, it just wasn’t a good fit.”
Eventually, guitarist Mike Hartl discovered singer Johnny Franchino performing R&B at an open mic night in Kenosha. He seemed like a stretch, but they brought him in anyway. “I wasn’t sure it was going to work out well, because he was an R&B guy, and we were a rock band, but he came in and he just killed it,” Santana says. “He started singing, and I was like, ‘This guy really knows how to work with our music; he’s making it sound like it has style.’ You know, sometimes when you mix genres it can sound really corny, but after our first few practices the music was already flowing so well that in my mind it was a no brainer that we should set up some studio time.”
This winter, The New Grey released their self-titled debut—a five-song EP they recorded with Shane Hochstetler at Howl Street Recordings. Its funk-rock fusion sounds like little else coming out of the city right now, though ’90s Milwaukee music fans might hear echoes of two of the city’s hip-hop-influenced alternative bands from that era, Little Blue Crunchy Things and Citizen King. There’s also a little bit of the live-on-stage feel of The Roots’ ’90s records.
The band’s sound was a hodgepodge even before Franchino joined the group, Santana explains. Santana and bassist Jake Rieboldt came from a background of punk and ’90s rock, while Hartl was more into bluesy rock ’n’ roll. “Mike also was like a huge reggae fan, so you can hear some of the reggae influence in there, too,” Santana says. “But Johnny coming in was like the curveball. He has his R&B thing, which was outside the box for us, but he also has some hip-hop, too, and that’s what makes it fun. I think if his style was strictly R&B, it may not have worked out. He’s able to be soulful when he needs to, and he can be aggressive as well.”
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Where that sound places The New Grey in the Milwaukee music scene remains to be seen, but Santana says they’ll be fine with wherever the chips fall.
“When we came together, I was like, ‘Oh wow, I like the way this sounds,’ but then my thought was, ‘OK, who’s going to embrace us? Will we fall into the indie-rock scene or will there be some hip-hop/R&B acts interested in having us, or are we just going to be kind of this weird offshoot that doesn’t make sense in any genre?’ But I like to think we’re going to fit in somewhere. We got asked to play this college basement show with some grungy Milwaukee bands, and I was surprised about that, but they really wanted us to play the show, so it’s not like it was out of our realm necessarily. We’re just happy about anybody who wants to take us on. If somebody says ‘you want to play?’ we just say yes.”
The New Grey will play the Midwest Original Music Festival’s Battle of the Bands Finals on Saturday, March 24, at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn. The event starts at 8 p.m.
