Day Three hundred and seventeen - Can't bee

Who : Moonspell

Album name : The Butterfly Effect

Formed : 1992

From : Amadora, Portugal

What do they play : Gothic metal / industrial metal (at least according to Wikipedia)

Release date : September 13, 1999.

Two things right off the bat : those who know me, know of my disdain and dislike for this album pretty much since day one. I'll expand upon why further down the line. And the other thing is, how in the name of fuck did this thing come out twenty-five years ago? That's a whole quarter of a century! What madness is this? And then I remember that - yes - this album came out three months before my son was born, and he too turns twenty-five this year. So it helps put it into perspective why I really didn't pay that much attention to it when I first bought it - and believe me, I bought it right when it came out. I had other priorities, my mind was elsewhere, my life was changing - I had no patience whatsoever to listen to music. I think I listened to it only the once at the time, but my heart wasn't in it because I absolutely detested the first single - 'Butterly FX' - which reeked of Marilyn Manson-esque sounds, and I have never been a fan of that. So that first listen really didn't do anything for me, I only found myself enjoying one song there - 'Can't bee' - and I wouldn't give it another chance for a number of years.

But I should add that the band itself - Moonspell - is one that is very, very important to me, in a specific period of my life. I fell in love with their music as early as their very first E.P., and their first three albums are albums that I love and listen to this day. 'Wolfheart', 'Irreligious' and 'Sin/Pecado' are all excellent records, filled with some great, catchy songs - yes, even if we're talking about a darker sort of metal they were playing then, they were producing some definitely catchy songs. And for me, their masterwork has always been the aforementioned 'Sin/Pecado', a record that for me is just about one song away from perfection - there's a song there called 'Eurotica' that I will always wish wasn't there at all, that's how bad it is. And that album, which had only come out over a year and a half before, lived rent free in my mind. I loved the romanticism of it, I loved how well written the songs and the lyrics were, I loved how ambitious its scope was. And everything it was.... 'The Butterfly Effect' was not.

Throughout the years - about every five years or so, I guess - I'd try to listen to it, but it never managed to sway me. All the faults I found in it - the ones that are true and the ones that are imagined - have always been present in all my listens. As recently as about a year and a half ago I had to listen to it because I recorded a podcast episode with some friends of mine and we talked about the band, and still it did nothing for me. I kind of gave up ever liking the album. And then a few days ago, when I was leaving the restaurant, and decided to go for a long walk, I was listening to 'Sin/Pecado' on Apple Music, and as it ended, instead of putting on one of my curated playlists, I let it play as it moved on to 'The Butterfly Effect'. And as I walked alone, that chilly November night, still feeling slightly ashamed and low, I finally got the album. That moment, everything in it finally made sense to me. And granted - there are some songs there that I'm absolutely not crazy about, whether because they sound weird or because they have an odd structure, but I found myself actually enjoying the album. Even the dreaded 'Butterfly FX' was strangely listenable. I listened to that record a couple more times before I got home, that night, and have revisited it a few more times since. It's certainly a grower - something that often happens to me. I just never had one that took me this long to really grow on me. 

I'm not sure that I would rate as highly as I rate 'Sin/Pecado', but I now have a much greater appreciation for this record. Again, it's a me thing, and I always think that records can be edited or pared down a bit to make them that much better, that much tighter, maybe one or two songs could have stayed on the cutting floor, but as it stands? I'll give this one four out of five moons.