In 1994, shortly after most of their musical dreams collapsed, Majesty Crush played a show opening for alt-rockers Belly. After seeing them perform, lead singer Tanya Donelly pulled aside the band’s bassist and told him point blank, “I think everyone in your band needs therapy.”
The bitter comedy in Donelly’s observation wasn’t that Majesty Crush had hit a low point; she had simply noticed the askew intensity that kept them going. An American shoegaze band that merrily sang about wanting to assassinate politicians and be debased like an animal while crafting tunes just as dreamy and gorgeous as their UK peers, Majesty Crush were upfront with their desires to the point of repulsion. Butterflies Don’t Go Away, Numero Group’s new compilation of the band’s only album and few EPs, explores this tension: a melding of the unsavory and sweet, raw lust and desire amplified tenfold by tense basslines and waves of pillowy distortion. It would have been enough to send them far beyond the Midwest and on to bigger things—if only anything, internally and externally, had gone right.
Majesty Crush originated in Detroit at the dawn of 1990. The start of a new decade had brought the end of Spahn Ranch, a sparse, gothic post-punk band featuring Odell Nails III and aspiring music journalist Hobey Echlin. Itching to start a new band, Nails turned to his roommate and high school friend, David Stroughter. The duo turned back to Echlin to be their bassist. Michael Segal, a local record store clerk who had introduced Stroughter and Nails to A.R. Kane’s 69, completed the lineup on guitar. A.R. Kane’s album would become the new band’s Rosetta Stone: evidence for how to make noisy, echo-filled songs about deeply intimate desires, as well as how being Black did not exclude you from making such music.
By 1992 Majesty Crush had begun to self-release singles and rise in the Detroit scene, powered in part by Stroughter’s stark intensity on stage and the band’s unwillingness to be confined by genre. Dali, an Elektra subsidiary, came calling; before 1993 even started, the band was making plans to record its debut. That record, Love 15, is presented here in full and stands as one of the most unheralded shoegaze albums of the ’90s. Opener “Boyfriend” is a sly wink: Its plumbing cymbal crashes and jet-engine guitar squall invoke the overwhelming barrage of other albums of the era before giving way almost immediately, opening up to real song, full of gliding guitar notes and Stroughter’s roughly sultry vocals about how he’s going to take another man’s girlfriend and make him squirm while he does it. Not that the band was afraid to be loud. “Seles” and “Grow” are beyond generous with the feedback, all the better to accent the unfettered debauchery within both. Still, there were few dream-pop bands of the time who could produce something like “Penny for Love”: easily the catchiest song the band ever wrote, with a rhythmic energy as infectious as the singing, even if Stroughter is talking about selling his body so he can buy time with someone else’s.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
