Sumner duo’s star on the rise
The Tacoma News Tribune (4/08/05) by Ernest A. Jasmin

The Cloves, Sunday night’s headliners at Jazzbones, appear to be on the fast track.

Childhood friends Michael Hochstatter and Kevin Poleskie formed the Sumner-bred band, which plays a melodic brand of rock that stylistically falls somewhere between the ’60s band the Byrds and the late Elliott Smith. That sound, built around the founding duo’s sweet vocal harmonizing, earned the Cloves – also guitarist Chris Walbridge and drummer Jason Maybell – two dates at The Showbox nightclub in Seattle, one as an opening act last fall and the most recent as a headliner in January.

 

Granted, the latter was a rental, put on by Seattle-based Epidemic Music and not organizers at The Showbox. But a bit of context is required when you consider the Cloves have been performing for less than a year and had played only six shows as a four-piece before the January gig.

 

Among the bands that have headlined The Showbox in recent years are Pearl Jam, Queens of the Stone Age and The Hives. Local headliners tend to be more established acts – the likes of Maktub and the Blood Brothers.

 

So it was no small feat for the Cloves to attract a few hundred fans to one of the Jet City’s most popular venues.

 

“I think their music speaks for itself,” said Travis “Tre” Straw of Epidemic Music, who booked the Cloves on the strength of their demo recording. “I thought they were a national act when I heard their music,” he said. “They have what it takes to make it. They could be the next big thing to come out of Seattle.”

The band’s founders maintain a low-key yet bewildered attitude about the whole thing.

 

“Don’t ask me how it happened,” Hochstatter said.

 

“We’d never played such a big place,” Poleskie said, recalling the fall gig. “Nothing even close, and we didn’t know what to expect.”

 

A broad grin crossed Hochstatter’s face as he put the show in perspective. “Take a couple of guys from Sumner, just a little town,” he said, “and we’re practicing at my grandma’s house in a spare bedroom with not even a proper PA system. It squeals if it gets too loud. … Then all of a sudden (we’re) getting a show at The Showbox.”

 

“That’s why the show was so great,” Poleskie said. “We could hear ourselves, and we were so pumped. The sound system was great; the crowd was so great. That was our best show, I think.”

The band has its roots on the Sumner street where Hochstatter and Poleskie grew up. The pair met when they were 6 years old and have been best friends since.

 

They started writing music together in high school after Hochstatter was diagnosed with chronic fatigue and, forced to quit playing sports, turned to music as an outlet. The friends continued writing together on weekends when Poleskie attended Western Washington University from 1998 to 2002, with no concrete plan for what to do with the songs they’d written.

 

“The reason we started the band was we had so many songs compiled,” Hochstatter said. “We were, like, ‘What’re we going to do with this?’ We probably had a hundred songs.”

 

They found Walbridge and Maybell through an ad in an alternative weekly newspaper. The Cloves played their first show last April and have since alternated between fully electric sets with the whole band and acoustic ones featuring Hochstatter and Poleskie.

 

Sunday’s show is in promotion of the Cloves’ new six-song CD, “Waiting for the World to Be,” which was partly recorded at Studio Litho, the Seattle studio owned by Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard.

 

The Cloves found both a sense of humor and awe regarding being on the recording schedule with the likes of part-time Seattleite Dave Matthews. “We had to squeeze in behind him because we wanted to get that piano done earlier,” Hochstatter said. “But he had it blocked out for a whole month or something. So we squeezed in like the day after.”

 

“The day we were recording was (Pearl Jam singer) Eddie Vedder’s 40th birthday,” Poleskie said. “A couple of the engineers were throwing a party for him.”

 

“So they weren’t there,” Hochstatter said. “So we had the studio all to ourselves.”