Marcia (Marcia (band AU))

Dirty Dirge, the self-titled first track by the band, featuring Marcia on lead guitar.

The up-and-coming band Dirty Dirge owes much of its sudden rise to its impossible-to-ignore frontwoman, Marcia. A singer and lead guitarist who lives and breathes the stage lights, she feels every song deep in her core and has a flair for overstated and dramatic performances that make the amateur band far more entertaining to watch than it has any right to be.

In person she is much the same: expressive, larger-than-life, constantly in search of new indulgences, and verging on melodramatic sometimes. She gave up her day-job as a waitress for her career on the stage, a risk none of her band-mates have had to, or dared, take.

Marcia finds a way to throw a wild guitar solo into every performance; she goes off of intuition and instinct rather than tireless practice, unlike their keyboardist Hong Yi. While not the best singer around, there's a certain deep, heartfelt quality to her voice that commands the wonder of those who've heard it. This is in contrast to the harsher timbre of her guitar, a custom bronze-coloured Carvin/Kiesel that she affectionately calls the Brazen Bull. In keeping with the theme, she also likes to wear a pair of bull horns when she performs; most misunderstand this as some sort of demonic getup when in actuality she's just fond of bovines.

Marcia has great rapport with (and a fierce infatuation with) the bassist of the band, Vesper, who has the perfect combination of flexibility matching Marcia's and a willingness to cede presence to her. They could improvise a whole performance together, and during jamming sessions, they regularly riff off each other's musical inventions to create songs that are then promptly lost forever (because they never remember to record themselves). The ease with which they sync creatively sets Marcia's heart fluttering in a way she hasn't felt since she was sixteen.

She and Hong Yi (stage name PULSAR) are the unfettered pleasure seekers of the band: while the other two are off at work or practicing, these two are generally bar-hopping, smoking and occasionally having casual sex (they aren't interested in getting attached…or at least they don't think so). Of late, Marcia has begun to miss her party partner's company, because he's been devoting more time to his undergrad thesis.