Ettison Clio (Clio pronounced like Ohio) is a five-piece, female-fronted rock outfit, with aspirations of touring Australia, Europe, and Japan. Go big, or go home.
Biography By Brandon Harper (2004) Although Ettison Clio's roots have firmly taken to the soil of East Lansing, MI, to call them a local East Lansing band is nothing short of pigeon holing. After 2 national U.S. tours, and over 200 shows played, Ettison Clio has proved if nothing else, that they are certainly not a regional band with only regional appeal. Of course, this is no surprise. With influences that range from Dinosaur Jr. and Muse, to Miles Davis and Old Blue Eyes, Mr. Frank Sinatra, Ettison Clio covers a wide variety of sound in their songs. 'Musically, the band paints in broad strokes', says drummer John Ostler. 'We are versatile in our songwriting. Every song has it's own unique sound, but every song sounds like Ettison Clio. I think people like that.' And with over 2000 copies of their Fragile Simplistic E.P. sold, over 40,000 plays on mp3.com, being awarded track of the day on garageband.com (October 7, 2003), ranking #82 out of an astonishing 1,992 bands on garageband.com (April 30, 2004), thousands on their mailing list, and a street team with over 400 members, fans appear to agree with him. But what is it that drives fans into the arms of Ettison Clio, and the Clios into the hearts of their fans? 'I think what sets us apart from other bands in the emo, pop punk, indie scene, whatever you want to call it, is that we are a female-fronted band who has no problem with being really aggressive', says Ostler. Guitarist Brian Roop agrees with Ostler totally. 'When we started out, we had two male singers, so when they left and Stephanie (Gunther) joined, it was important to try to play as hard as we could to counter-balance Stephanie's feminine voice.' Not to say that Gunther's voice is in anyway submissive or meek. The voice may be as beautiful as the woman it comes out of, but nowhere in the definition of the word does it say that beauty cannot be powerful at the same time. All it takes to understand this is the visceral experience of seeing Ettison Clio's live show. Tenacious and ferocious, the Clios pull no punches on stage, hitting fans with loud guitars, fierce beats, and simple aesthetic melody, giving every show everything they have. 'I'd like to think the main reason kids come to see us live is to take part in the great amount of energy we exude on stage', says Gunther. 'We are constantly in motion, which I think helps to give the audience a taste of the emotion we feel towards our music. We want to have fun up there and do whatever comes natural to us. I think kids appreciate that, and can in turn feel open to being a part of that energy as well.' Essentially, the band was born at the high school of Roop, guitarist J.P. Niemiec, and bassist Jared Nisch in Canton/Plymouth. After the departure of the original two lead vocalists, the band answered a classified ad placed by Stephanie Gunther, then a student at Michigan State University in East Lansing in 2001. After auditioning, Stephanie was asked to join. Not much later, the original drummer departed, and Gunther suggested a childhood friend and talented drummer John Ostler, also in attendance at MSU, take over percussion duties. Although more a student of jazz, Ostler was no stranger to rock drumming, having played in several reasonably successful pop-punk bands based in Saginaw, MI, Gunther and Ostler's home town. Thus, in October of 2002, the current and most likely final incarnation of Ettison Clio emerged. Since then, the band certainly has not looked back, though it's not to say that it's been the easiest of roads. Through practicing in a heatless storage space, having to steal electricity from an outside outlets on lamp-posts to power their equipment, nearly suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning from a propane heater meant to power a camping stove, touring the country in a Honda Civic with nothing but the clothes on their back and their guitars, and an incident involving a torrent of rain and a long expanse of extension cord that resulted of the electrocution of Nisch and the blackout of the neighborhood in which their rehearsal space, the term used loosely, was located, the band has still managed to press on and become better for it without losing their sense of humor about their oddly comic past. On December 3, 2004, Ettison Clio will release their first full length studio recording, This is for the Blue Collars, to be released on Forever Inside Records of Detroit. Recorded in Miami, FL, the album was produced by Jeremy duBois who has produced albums for Dashboard Confessional and New Found Glory, among others. This album proves to be a new mile stone for a band who has already seen a great many of them in their career. From both high points to hardships, it appears as though Ettison Clio is going nowhere but up. It makes one think that the near electrocution of Nisch was simply a painful premonition of an extremely bright future.
