Another month and another naturally creative and prodigious talent is primed for the margins of mainstream success. Last month it was Clarkesville, this month is the turn of Butterfly Boucher. But what makes this a little different is that Butterfly not only writes her own music, she also performs it, produces it and mixes it. What also makes it a little different, is that recent single release, ‘I Can’t Make Me’ showed mucho promise in its audacious melding of Badly Drawn Boy whimsicality, homespun philosophizing and the gutsy femme-power of a good ol’ Sheryl Crow record. Disappointingly though, this is by far the best thing on the album.
Born in Australia to a freewheeling dadio who supported fellow ozmeisters AC/DC on home turf and a Mom who was so fatalistic about life that she took one look at the butterfly on the wall of her first child’s elementary school and decided her second daughter should be called ‘Butterfly’. Just as well it wasn’t a lobster or a dung-beatle or a shitty painting of a house.
Simple, clear and compressed into a neat little vacuum of charm and kooky wordiness, ‘I Can’t Make Me’ is all the things that many of the songs on this album are not: subtle, evenly charged and self-assured. Tracks like ‘Can You See The Light’? and ‘Soulback’ on the otherhand, are, for the most part, overeager, unremarkable and steeped in dense, swarming layers of growling guitars and thick, thumping drum patterns. Whilst the melodies are pretty enough, the production seems unsuitable. These are delicate songs, and Butterfly seems to have picked up a hammer instead of a hairpin to groom them. The disembodied piano, the muted guitars and the tubby bass are all but torn apart by the gross, exploding drum-fills and the spontaneously combusting distortion. ‘A Walk Outside’ with it’s probing central premise, ‘Which Came First? Love or The Love Song?’ just about holds its head against a similarly blitzkrieg production – but again, the overpowering power-chords and crazyhead drumming totally undermine its gently wrought web of complexity and reflectivity.
Better, but by no means perfect, are the earnest and low-key ballads. ‘Never leave Your Heart’ adopts the heart-rending piano chords of Badfinger’s ‘Without You’ and some swirling psychedelia, whilst it’s the Kathryn Williams sounding ‘Don’t Point, Don’t Scare It’ and the plaintive and beautiful ‘Drift On’ that show the clearest evidence yet of a remarkable and mercurial talent.
It’s quite possible that less is more. I can only hope Butterfly can make that same connection for her second album.