Butterflies Don't Go Away cover

Butterflies Don't Go Away

Released

While there had been a previous overview of Majesty Crush’s work released in 2009, the 2024 collection Butterflies Don’t Go Away, released on Numero with their usual detailed liner notes, is arguably the best way to explore the work of the still-too-obscure early American shoegaze quartet, founded in Michigan in 1990 by sweet-voiced singer David Stroughter. The core of Butterflies is the sole full-length effort by the group, the 1993 album Love 15, with a slew of accompanying songs from a variety of singles and EPs from 1992 to 1994. The band’s signature song, “No. 1 Fan,” appears in both its Love 15 version and as showcased on an earlier EP; either way, the surging flow of the music, heightened by one of Stroughter’s strongest vocals, demonstrates why the track led off Third Man Records’ later anthology of the Michigan scene at that time, Southeast of Saturn. Michael Segal’s guitar work unsurprisingly shaped a lot of the band’s strengths, a deft blend of yearning tone, trippiness and shimmering riffs that suited the genre, while the rhythm section of Hobey Echlin and Odell Nails III was no less accomplished.

Ned Raggett

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