90s Detroit shoegaze band, Majesty Crush, have announced a career-spanning, double LP collection, titled Butterflies Don’t Go Away, due out March 29th through The Numero Group record label. Featuring singles like “Cicciolina,” “Uma,” “Penny for Love,” and “No. 1 Fan,” it showcases the band’s diverse catalog, including lesser-heard versions of their songs. The band have also released a visualizer video for “No.1 Fan,” from the EP of the same name, which will see its first digital release on February 20. Keep reading below for more.
Stream “No. 1 Fan (EP version)” here.
Pre-order Butterflies Don’t Go Away here.
“The Fan Ep version of “No. 1 Fan” is, if not the, then certainly a major turning point in the Majesty Crush story. What was essentially a polished demo on a self-released 5-song EP became an area radio hit on the local alt-rock station,” Hobey Echlin (bass) tells. “By the time the band recorded it in late ‘91 with producer Mike E. Clark in the demo room of The Tempermill Studio, “No. 1 Fan” sounded like a band whose ambitions were outgrowing their indie roots. Nails’ drums were insistent, the bassline shifted from notes to chords to finally octaves, with Michael Segal’s sighing and soaring guitar lines – all underscoring Stroughter’s escalating trademark vocals that had at that point advanced into a complete lyrical character, manic, personal and anthemic.”
Not just a band from Detroit, Majesty Crush was distinctively a product of Detroit—one that mirrored their city’s complexity, singularity and cross-culture. The band’s frontman/vocalist David Stroughter, guitarist Mike Segal, bassist Hobey Echlin and drummer Odell Nails created a form of dream pop that was charged and uncompromising at a time when many were succeeding on an international level for merely recycling sounds originated by bigger bands. Instead of a Midwestern assimilation of a shoegaze movement evolving in real time all around them, Majesty Crush was a far stranger, impossibly individualized blur of personalities, experiences, and perspectives informed by the independent music badlands of the early ’90s, which played out in the unlit, unregulated corners of the Motor City.
Butterflies Don’t Go Away tracklisting:
LP 1 – Love 15
Side A:
01 Boyfriend
02 Uma
03 No. 1 Fan
04 Brand
05 Purr (Interlude)
06 Seles
Side B:
01 Grow
02 Pretty Head
03 Cicciolina
04 Penny For Love
05 Skin (Interlude)
06 Feigned Sleep
07 Horse
LP 2 – EPs & Singles
Side C:
01 No. 1 Fan (EP Version)
02 Worri
03 Horse (EP Version)
04 Sunny Pie
05 Cicciolina (7″ Version)
Side D:
01 Purr (7″ Version)
02 Space Between Your Moles
03 Seine
04 If JFA Were Still Together
05 Ghost Of Fun
More from Majesty Crush:
If you can deactivate the now-calcified preconceptions of ’90s nostalgia and push beyond the ear-perking noisy hooks that register at first as standard shoegaze moves, and get closer to the weird specifics and idiosyncratic details that live in all of their songs, it becomes easier to understand how Majesty Crush spent its existence on the perimeters of multiple scenes but belonged to none. Even thirty-some years later, there’s still no easy way to outline their tangled and confounding trajectory, or to make sense of how they teetered perpetually on the verge of a breakthrough that seemed promised but never arrived. This wasn’t a band that never caught a break, nor were they a bunch of stage-frightened introverts who would’ve made it if they’d just been a little more willing to play the game.
Majesty Crush was popular in its own right, enjoying local commercial alt-radio play and opening big shows for national bands right out of the gate. The band was signed to a subsidiary of a major label not terrifically long after starting out as one of many dreamy-eyed groups of the era that was self-releasing 7″s with smudged art on handmade covers. With close listening, the various shades of rawness that emerge in the lyrics, the sound, and the band’s ever-simmering overall energy begin to offer clues as to why the world wasn’t quite ready in the 90’s.
Majesty Crush went on to self-release their Sans Muscles EP in 1994, followed by a split seven inch in 1995 and they quietly disbanded after. A ‘best of’ compilation titled I Love You in Other Cities: The Best of Majesty Crush 1990-1995 was released in 2009, after band members had dispersed. Two years prior, Stroughter had landed in LA. He’d been diagnosed bi-polar schizophrenic at age 27, and though he was now making a living flipping cars, such a nomadic existence limited his access to medication and professional help. On January 18, 2017, he passed as a result of a tragic police shooting. David Darnell Stroughter was 50.
The impact of Stroughter’s death was concussive and lingering. No one in Majesty Crush had spoken to him in 10 years. A hand-written letter to Stroughter’s sister was found, in which he asked her to be the custodian of his music. It took on a bizarre and timely relevance when in early 2019, an early Majesty Crush supporter asked Echlin if the surviving band members had their masters and if they’d thought about a re-release. The next day, Echlin received a DM from a woman in Duluth, Minnesota, with the subject line: “I think I have your master tapes” and a picture of the Smart Studios boxes Stroughter had taken from the Dali offices fourteen years prior. He had left them with a roommate in LA in a closet, who had also recently passed, prompting his belongings—including the Love 15 masters—to be forwarded to his brother who was the woman’s husband. One year later, Third Man Records highlighted Majesty Crush in their Detroit-area shoegaze and space rock compilation Southeast of Saturn.
Follow Majesty Crush:
https://www.instagram.com/majestycrus