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azpartygirlz · 3 years ago

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Thursday, September 30th

SHANNON & THE CLAMS

at Club Congress (info/tix)

“I am terrified of spiders,” says Shannon Shaw. “My mom always told me that they’re drawn to me. Like, they would drop down and dangle in my face as a baby, or they’d get in my bed.”

But the powerhouse singer-bassist of retro-rock band Shannon & The Clams had bigger fears when she went to an astrologer two years ago. Shaw was at an emotional tipping point — willing to try anything — because everything she loved was falling apart.

“It felt like the end of an era,” Shaw says, which began to unravel in 2016 with the tragic Ghost Ship warehouse fire in the Clams’ DIY community in Oakland. In 2018, the California wildfires in Napa almost caused her parents to evacuate their homes. In 2019, a lurking intruder drove Shaw out of the beloved apartment she’d lived in for 14 years. And then, right as her band was getting invited on big tours with bands like Greta Van Fleet and The Black Keys, her father was diagnosed with cancer. “The idea of leaving my family was agonizing — it was torture,” Shaw says.

The astrologer told her to summon Durga when she felt powerless, a Hindu goddess who holds a weapon in each of her eight arms. Shaw saw the connection. “The symbolism of the spider made a full turn in an interesting way,” she says. “I was getting protection from the thing I feared the most.” Plus, she says with a laugh, “Spiders destroy the bullshit bugs. Like mosquitoes. Who needs ‘em?”

Year Of The Spider, the band’s sixth studio album, rages against death and disease with the power of a thousand angry Ronettes. Songs like “All Of My Cryin',” “Mary, Don’t Go,” and “Year Of The Spider,” pulse with girl-group elegance and punk ferocity. On a Clams record, you always get both.

That harsh/soft balance often comes down to Clams keyboardist Will Sprott. "Different keyboards lend themselves to different tones," Sprott says, "a Rhodes [piano] is more soft and bell-like, whereas a Wurlitzer has these chunky, abrasive bites. So when I'm deciding which instrument to play on a song, I'm thinking, what does the song make you feel? What do you want it to communicate? It's like, do you want this organ to scream at you or soothe you?"

On the album opener, it was a little bit of both. “Do I Wanna Stay" is a slow tango between Shaw's voice and Sprott's piano that builds to a break point when Shaw rasps, “I dream at night…” sounding like someone whittled Brenda Lee into a shiv.

"We went line by line with a fine-toothed comb to make sure the instrumentation matched each scene, almost like a movie," Sprott says, adding, "That's one thing about having Dan [Auerbach] as your producer — he is really good at seeing an overall vision of the sound — knowing when and where to add or remove certain layers."

Drummer Nate Mahan agreed, saying "Stay" was a true collaboration. "Shannon had a very unique idea about the tempo of that song that we had to work out with Dan … The timing took us quite a while to get right, but I'm really proud of how it came out."

When Mahan moved to Oakland in 2007, he was a fan of the band before he joined. "I was in a lot of improvisational and noise bands in a city that has every micro-genre you can imagine floating around … Shannon and the Clams stuck out to me because they had great songs with great singers, which I thought that really lacking in Oakland at the time."

Mahan's intuitive approach shines through on songs with dense imagery like, "Mary Don't Go" — one of Shaw and Auerbach's favorites. "I wanted to leave space for the words and pull back [on the drums]," Mahan says. "When you slow the pace, the words can feel more powerful."

On “Godstone," which tells the story of a surreal underwater encounter Shaw had in Hawaii, Mahan ditched the drums completely and played a halting, horn-like piano line while Sprott added the eerie arpeggiated synths.

The other source of the Clams' signature sound comes from the decade-long creative partnership between Shaw and Clams’ guitarist Cody Blanchard. In “I Need You Bad,” their voices lock into bewitching minor chords. “It’s like a zipper when we sing together,” Shaw said, “I think we have a blood harmony, though we’re not related.” Bands that do have blood harmonies — the Everly Brothers, the BeeGees — are major musical touchstones for them. But unlike those groups, Shaw, Blanchard are close friends. They live 15 minutes away from each other and when both are in town, will rehearse in the goat shed turned recording studio that Blanchard built in his yard.

Blanchard mixed Spider at Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studios the same week tornadoes devastated parts of Nashville right before the COVID-19 shutdowns in early 2020. He also wrote and sings lead on roughly half the songs on Spider. His songs, like “Flowers Will Return” and “In The Hills, In The Pines,” have swelling pop arrangements and a mysteriously sparse falsetto, reminiscent of bands like The Hollies and The Association.

As a songwriter, Blanchard said he can get neurotic, so he tried Dolly Parton’s trick: writing songs from another person’s point of view. It worked, yielding some of Spider’s darkest songs: the howling “Crawl,” which has a roiling hard-rock guitar (“that was really fun — just a classic, rippin’ ‘70s guitar solo”) and the album's first single, “Midnight Wine," a thundering baroque-pop number that was inspired by friends and people in the Oakland arts community who died of drug overdoses over the last few years.

“I was thinking specifically of the feeling of alienation,” said Blanchard. “Where it feels like nothing in society works for you. The only thing that makes sense is to get fucked up to the point where you don’t care if you die or not because life is too difficult and bleak.”

Spider ends with the slinky Motown-esque, “Vanishing.”Shaw dons her spiritual spider armor once more, singing directly and poignantly to her father (who is doing well, she said.) At first, Shaw wondered if the lyrics were too personal to put on the record.

“It’s very emotional, very tender,” she said. “I also had these ideas that made no sense, like having the weird call-and-response, but we made it work so it was one of those songs that gave me the chance to grow.”

#shannon & the clams #Hardly Art #shannon and the clams #garage punk #garage psych #doo-wop #1-2-3-4 go! records #oakland #california #shannon shaw

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obscuraxrp · 7 years ago

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The smoke settles to reveal LEE JOOEUN, also known as SCARLET, a 21 year old dragon-blooded of Sunseong. She is a singer, television, and radio persionality who appears to be adept in shapeshifting, enhanced strength, and fire manipulation --- but like most things in Sunseong, there must be more to her than meets the eye.

FACECLAIM: lee sunmi, soloist

APPEARANCE:

jooeun has a charm about her; soft features, long, flowing hair, supple and bright skin - an ideal type to many. that’s a great deal to her fame, but behind the flowing blouses and pearly teethed smile hides a dragon. quite literally. scales ranging from deep burgundy through bright pumpkin shades, are a normal part of her life. they dominate each shoulder blade where her wings might appear mid transformation as well as around the achilles of her calf. they shift on their own to breathe, and are usually able to be hidden by clothing and shoes, though need be exposed fully to air for at least 5 hours each day in order for her to stay healthy in her advanced well-being. that, alongside sharpened canines and eyes that shift between shades of orange depending on her mood (often covered by contacts, or assumed to be just that when she doesn’t shield them). when transformed, she gains jagged and beastly looking wings, ears pointed similar to an elf’s, with scales covering her entire body and nails that become rough, long and claw like, and fully sharpened teeth. in partner to this, when she is injured, she can only heal at a hastier speed if she exposes her scales in that very area, but will usually find a private space to do this when needed.

BIOGRAPHY:

WHEN IT COMES 2U:

kindly, loving, adoring, occupied - she is the second. born to a larger ‘family’, already filled with overflowing joy with just one son and what more couldn’t a girl add? she was a complete breath of fresh air, whether a good or bad one. unassuming and quiet, she clung to her brother’s side with vigour everywhere they went, never stopping to point out any oddity thy passed as the world amazed her for its every breadth and width.

not often were they let out of the house, and the idea of stepping further than ten metres away from their parents was absolutely ludicrous. every story they were read was plain, blank, void of character and creativity, but that was the poor reality of how the two flowers bloomed. a year difference meant nothing to them, nor did the subliminal education they were given by the wider community they knew to be more so a family than anything else. the religious texts handed to them for every holiday were clutched between their small hands as any other child might hold a toy car or doll.

ancient languages and scripts were imprinted in their everyday lifestyle, waking at exactly six every morning to feed the farm animals, before going to “class” at mrs. seo’s house. they learnt everything any other young might, and school seemed just as a dread to them and their friends as their neighbours, but things were not so seemingly plain out there.

she was only seven when her beloved brother pulled her aside, covering her with one of his full length coats after she had gone running in the hills and gotten bitten by a mamushi pit viper. she hadn’t cried, nor had she made any noise of disdain, but rather watched her thigh cover itself in some foreign reptile-like skin that shifted with the light. it had taken him only a minute to find her and seem crazily underwhelmed by this alien occurrence. no, he gives her one of the most fearful gazes, mumbling repeated phrases such as “don’t tell mom about this - you cannot.”, “things.. nothing.. i won’t let them do anything to you.” and “don’t worry, just know your older brother,” he gestures to himself with shaking hands, temples damp with sweat “knows how to handle this alright.”.

they return home earlier than expected, mary rushing up to her father to tell him about their day, but not before recalling what abel had said, quieting herself and giving him a short kiss on the cheek. not for another two years does she see much sun, abel unable to let her out of the house in fear someone might see something like that happen again. unsurprisingly, all changes in one class trip into sunseong, which seemed to be bubbling with life. mrs seo was teaching all of the attentive students about the dangers of such big places, the influxes of sinners, the dirty reality of such a materialistic paradise as mary’s eyes stay fascinated with the outside world. everything besides their blackened van was so vibrant, so bright - so new.

the air held something more than the smell of grass and fertilizer, but it held a wholesomeness. music played every corner they turned, and from the peeks of open windows, she could even see the scenes of the city on full; beautiful and dazzling, nothing like she had been told. some words she is unfamiliar with, but the obnoxiously large billboards were enough to tell her the place was flooded with colour in every shape and form. there were girls with short hair, and boys with even longer hair than her’s, their style jumping out at her in comparison to the modest blue and white she was all too familiar with back in the countryside.

they are let out for a thirty-minute expedition, oddly enough, as they’d only been offered freedom into nowhere in the past. she wishes to stay by her brother’s side, but he disappears before she could say “lost”. her head goes wild, her feet making jagged steps along the abandoned sidewalk as she feels as though she’s being watched with every movement she makes. was this the feeling abel had talked about? was this why he always had shivers down his spine when he went to the weekly sermon and had to take communion as one of the church’s favorite pupils of their holiest god. at the thought of him, she remembers a new word he’d taught her on the way through the mountains to sunseong: library. a (forbidden) place of learning, peaceful, and what he said might be his favorite place when he moved out.

she couldn’t fathom what he meant by move out a few hours ago. why would they ever leave the safe haven that was their circle of households. but now, she almost understands. she encountered a concerned storekeeper, and all she could think to say was library. thank goodness for coincidence, for she was only a five minute wander away.

abel was not wrong. the place was grand and gorgeous like he had described. she falls easily into the pile of children sitting around reading happily, settling next to a kind looking older girl with a stack of books beside her. instinctually, she starts picking up everything else this girl discards and soon enough catches her attention. not consensually - rather, mary has to ask her what 5 words mean every chapter she reads. what certain places are, movie names mean. funnily enough, they end up getting along swell and sharing what her newfound friend, jieun, had for lunch. something delicious called seaweed, and a very funny looking bread called a bagel with jieun’s favorite toppings. she called them ‘cream cheese and salmon’, and they were most delicious.

for two hours, she is a normal kid, living the life of any other sunseong resident. she even rents some books out she thinks abel would just adore; gulliver’s travels, tintin, asterix, the little prince, and heidi. some hour later, she stumbles across a frantic looking mrs seo, who grabs her arm in a frenzy before dragging her behind her, oblivious to the literature mary assumed that might just be snatched away from her the moment she stepped back into their hyundai. when she sees her brother, he tugs her beside him and seizes her bag of goods, stuffing it under their seat as he gave her a subtle wink. it is all she needs to see to take a deep breath out, and wave goodbye to the darker, but still thriving township as they drove away.

DON’T BE BLIND, WATCH ME SPEAK FROM MY HEART:

upon her arrival, she doesn’t return home. she has no time to stuff those books beneath her mattress, just like abel did every time he returned from trips to the church, or better, the nearby village.

instead of a mundane, slightly delayed supper, she is torn away from her horrified looking sibling by men exclaiming ‘monster’. screams ripping loud form her vocal chords with chaotic purpose, unlike any life she’d known to live in her 12 years before. her skin rages with heat against the cold, being torn from every sepia-filtered reality she had ever seen, all against her will, an uncomfortable fire rising in the pits of her soul that crawls up the back of her throat. she sees something similar to a pleased smile on both of her parent’s faces, and something clicks. as she is dragged along a dirt road, face smothered in tears, a sharp shiv against the already torn up scales covering her exposed neck and shoulder, the ground begins to move.

well, in actuality, it is her that shakes the ground. things turn a blur for those surrounding her figure, no mary in sight, but instead, some beastly body twisting and turning into something even worse than they could’ve expected from their little girl. covered in jagged scales, horns raising from her skull impatiently, shifting in the light to reveal something out of a storybook, or a thriller, you can decide a preference. fire in it’s eyes, terrifying her audience quite well. during her transition, those same perpetrators do not notice their surroundings burning slowly, breaking out into hellfire at the tip of only a thirteen-year-old boy’s hands. there is not a moment to question anything, mary’s feet moving on their own back down toward the midnight highway pushing through the comfortable confines of flame, hoping to encounter the same presence of her brother she felt strong enough in her frantic sprint.

bare feet press on beneath her, against the rugged and cool dirt road.

no one follows her far enough to see her fall from instant exhaustion at the bottom of the path. for what she can know, anyhow.

CLEAR YOUR HEAD, AIN’T GOTTA WAKE UP TO AN EMPTY BED

when she awakens, she shares a seat with a familiar smelling someone. when her eyes open, adjusting to the light, abel is beside her in his pajamas, two bags crowding his lap filled with what had to be a collection of necessities and reading. the scene is picturesque as she rises to her knees, gazing outside to see an unfamiliar and barren looking view of fields, upon fields, upon fields. not until she is offered a mandarin by a kind old lady behind her does her attention spiral to the events she had just gone through. nibbling away at the sweet, her hands shake her resting sibling urgently waiting for an explanation. something had turned dramatically, and she demanded to know where they were. what’d happened? if they were okay.

it surprises her when all she gets is a sigh, and a minute or so later, he says something barely clear enough for her to interpret right beside him. “that was not home. home is together, now.”. she doesn’t know what he means and continues annoying him with everything she could think of to question, but all she gets is one worded answers until she says something that’d been weighing on her shoulders long enough, “why do i have scales like a snake?”, which at this point he had snapped at her to whisper her woes before she shouts them. he merely says that people like them are different, and cannot be seen like that in society. when they go outside, if they showed what they were, it would only cause havoc and violence, for that is all humans are good at.

he hands her his notebook, offering some further narrative for the next four hours, before telling her the truth. enough of it, anyway. she doesn’t know what exactly a cult is, but she knows to duck if she ever sees anyone of that place again, and that all they wanted from them was the blood of a mag. something higher, godly - exactly that greed they were taught profusely to refuse. ironic, abel chuckled, flipping the pages of his psalms book, not before tossing it out of the aperture above them without another glance. she winces, still not quite comprehending what was happening around her, and why he was being so uncharacteristically crass.

for she was meant to be home. collecting the eggs from the chicken pen, reciting her morning prayer… yet, she felt something very right about not living along that regime. she said rebellion and he shook his head with a laugh, explaining that from now on, they would be able to sleep in just like the characters in the stories he read her nightly. that maybe they wouldn’t be able to live together anymore, but that didn’t mean thy’ never see each other again. that hopefully, they’d become those endearing siblings that relied on each other like the solar system did the sun.

SHARE MY LIFE, IT’S YOURS TO KEEP

certain parts of life are but a dream. hiking to a police station and expecting to be sent straight to an orphanage with nothing but a birth certificate certifying ages and telling the two their real names, is one of those things. they’re received somewhat kindly for children, but seem to be far more of a foreign kind of entertainment for them. all that is offered to them is a motel residence that would be paid for until their situation was ‘resolved’.

suffice to say, abel had them quickly out of that deal by claiming they were merely overwhelmed by the cold weather and were in fact lost on their way home and wanted to find a place for warmth. at far better grips with his abilities, he has a hotel lobbyist invite them to stay in a single room as long as he stopped looking at her with that intense fire in his gaze. they were lucky to both be relatively charming, or their first week in sunseong might have been an even worse of an experience.

though they were severely unaware of anything happening around them, and may more so than abel, her brother seemed to have the place mapped in his mind, and only took a few turns from their residence to find an underground system of those considered more super.

they say dragons are directly related to gold, and they aren’t wrong. the two had been swept up kindly by a man who couldn’t have been more out of place. dressed casually, he was fifteen years older than him and spoke as if the group had been younger cousins that he’d known for their lifetime. with a bounce in his step, he offered abel the opportunity to utilize his natural ability with numbers and picking up concepts, and for his labor, they couldn’t receive a proper education.

holding onto life dearly as things flew past was new for her, but mary figured out in the first few circumstances sleeping in the trees with literal fire in her hands that she had no extra second to question. things, no matter where she was, came in cycles. for the first two years in their new hometown, she learned to reject any knowledge or religious affiliation with her past life. by nature, she was a noble and respectful person, believing that her potential as beast blooded was unimaginably valuable. she doesn’t understand much of who she is, and so does what abel does, and paints herself new.

she’s the theatre junkie, plaid-clad and totally admirable lee jooeun. captain of the junior volleyball team, apprentice of infamous accountant kim tan, a man she recalls saved her from the harshest of street side living. that wasn’t true, of course, and she desperately wanted to credit her beloved sibling but alas, he wished to stay irrelevant. he was happy to see her fitting in, whether it be with the mask of someone he could never imagine loving as a sister. not in a bad way, but in the sense that she was incredibly unfamiliar to him. and to herself, also.

as he learned to study and earn, she was given time to advance what she had. jooeun was particularly talented in the physical aspects of being a beast blooded dragon. her transformations were slowly becoming effortless and flawless, despite leaving her tired and peckish. she excelled in hiding herself efficiently, and that she didn’t enjoy, but saw as necessary. no one ever put her under suspicion, and she intended it keep it that way.

this is exactly how she is discovered. standing in the rain, uniform kept dry by a stranger’s umbrella, asking her what kind of a singer she was. the thought never came to her that music class was so enjoyable for such a reason. within months she was whisked into a life of faux luxury and intense training to be Korea’s next top soloist at 16.

and so it becomes. news articles; tabloid covers; magazine spreads; editorials; runways; dramas - she does more than well. ‘with the face of an angel and the stare of an ever alluring demon’ is one that makes even abel laugh heartily, earring her a whack across the head and a yell telling her to focus more on her homework before being sent off to a recording the next day.

like a high speed train missing it’s final stop, jooeun has been late to everything in life she could imagine. but now, with all eyes on her, she had even less time to stop and smell the roses. she’d have to pick them and store them for later, for god forbid anyone ever get a break around here.

CHARACTERIZATION:

INTO THE ARMS OF ANGELS;

jooeun is someone very frantic and disorganised, thanks to not really knowing what’s happening when she doesn’t have her phone alerting her to reminders every other minute

she still strives to be like her brother though, and tends to get anxious about the smaller things and how those will plan out and usually just lets life pass her by like so

she only now is starting to see the negative effects of this, and tries to practise meditation, but always gets caught up in her thoughts so resorts to a lot of driving in early hours of the morning once she forgets she has a comeback stage six hours in the future

she’s very proud of her heritage, and tried to learn as much as she can about it, but it’s expected that some days she can’t overplay much anything with such a squeaky clean image that she has

though, has fallen through some scandals before with some risky fancams and photos that have had to have been taken down on various forums and shoved under a very crammed rug

DESPITE all of this, she still always finds a way to laugh, and knows better than anyone that enjoying your life while it’s lasts as free as it is makes for the best memories

memories, speaking of, hold conflicting values for jooeun

because she’d never seen the worse parts of what went on behind the childhood she lived but she knows from all the news reports and historical figures on their society how absolutely horrible it could’ve gotten had they not left

even though she had only pleasant things to remember until the final evening where everything just turned into hellfire

though, integrating into modern day Korean society wasn’t easy

she let herself learn as much as possibly and refused to be ignorant or arrogant, but completely dropped religion along with her brother and since she can’t discuss her history she just tries to be there for her fans struggling in unsafe households or upbringings of a different sort

her heart is filled with love for her job as it is her beast blooded-ness, even though it is her income, she can’t help but fall into a trance when she performs

because music, no matter where you are, jooeun believes it provides freedom that anyone strives for. it can form a nation, and keep one together that holds onto slithers of what it once was, no matter the conflicting opinions

and she wants her music to inspire, comfort, and provide a feeling of happiness and joy to her audience, and thus becomes somewhat of a workaholic whenever she has music to produce and perform

to her, money is something that must be treasured and invested well, and belong solely to one person otherwise it becomes a waste of time and space. typique dragon.

the truth is valuably, but lies have been the most constant part of her life and thus, she’s always been one to question the nature of people around her and tries to make her life easy enough to cut people off

when in public, she’s seen as something similar to the nation’s daughter, absolutely adored as she has an infamous rep for no scandalous rumours enough to actually prove anything apart from the fact she was… a dragon

she had her fair share of disdain thrown her way in any advantages she could’ve taken as someone with magic at her fingertips, but she always stood strong in her belief that those like her wished for peace and home, too

as someone from a cult who understand the weight of religion’s extremities, she is very openly atheist and believes in no god, which can become problematic with the wider christian population of south korea when she speaks of it on live television with seemingly no motive to her dislike

feels no debt to the system, and a certain amount of prejudice again human kind, but learnt mercy and naivety once more over her teenage years, and strives to become someone able to love before she can even think of hating.

SPECIALTIES:

from her dragon ancestry, she gains the ability of magical awareness alongside a minor ability of forecasting the weather, though similar to most other young beast blooded it is not well refined enough to be considered special

shapeshifting (rank two, 40 POINTS) she is able to take on both between and full fledged draconic forms; her scales adding durability, hearing becomes enhanced as she has more surface area to discover echo, talons, allows naturally easier access to her natural magics as well as her wings, giving her the power of flight and consequently speed (to certain extents). it is something she practices most, as it is where she’s most confident in the beauty that comes with being beast blooded, not the beast people assume people like her to be. control over her human body is usually well executed, unless she’s particularly tired, mindless or drunk, and consequently ends up in her most comfortable form (currently), her half transformation.

enhanced strength (rank two, 40 POINTS) against most other beast blooded, jooeun often prevailed as one far more physically versed in her heritage. whilst abilities that take more mental strength, such as sensitivity to magical and spiritual activity, are important she has always found it far easier to utilise her body’s advantages in combat. it was born into her, but she has also made it clear and established it is with her own hard work has she begun to uncover her ability to take more straining acts easily against opponents, such as withstanding injury or harm in physical combat easier, a specialty of hers.

fire manipulation (rank one, 20 POINTS) one skill that has taken her what feels aeons to even understand, her control is chaotic, but there. she can, for example, control the lighting and extinguishing of a fire place or lightbulb. jooeun can create smaller flames within her palms in human form. almost all of her fire power is produced from her hands, or at least, thats where she is the strongest, and has also got the ability of being able to raise her temperature and withstand heat/burning at a better level than most other beast blooded in either dragon, natural of human form.

#obs: follow #*lee sunmi #attempted murder tw #assault tw

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