For their fourth album Iron Butterfly replaced one guitarist with two, brought in a producer from outside the band for the first time since the debut, and put the new arrivals on the cover: several pressings credit the artist as Iron Butterfly with Pinera and Rhino.

The short version

Metamorphosis was released on 13 August 1970, recorded at American Recording Studio with Richard Podolor producing and arranging and Bill Cooper engineering. The label is ATCO, catalogue SD 33-339. It reached number 16 on the Billboard 200 and number 31 in Canada, and carries no certification. Erik Brann is not on it.

Two guitarists, an outside producer and a new name on the sleeve

Brann left in December 1969 and the band replaced him with two people: Mike Pinera and Larry Reinhardt, the latter credited on the sleeve as El Rhino. That takes Iron Butterfly to back to five members, as on the debut, and gives them two guitarists, the only album in the catalogue with more than one. It also splits the singing: Doug Ingle and Mike Pinera share the lead vocals rather than Ingle carrying them. Richard Podolor is credited as producer and arranger, and the arranging half of that credit is unusual for this band: nobody had held it on an Iron Butterfly record before. It is also the one album in the catalogue whose sleeve does not simply say Iron Butterfly, and the only one on which two members of the group are named in the artist credit.

The sound

Twin-guitar, studio-arranged heavy rock. The organ is still there but it is no longer the whole harmonic structure, because two guitars now occupy the space it used to fill, and the production is layered in a way none of the earlier albums are. One track is an instrumental, and it is very short. The album ends with a long piece, which is the one gesture back toward what the band were known for, but the rest of the record is a heavier, more conventional rock album made by a group with a new centre of gravity.

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The songs

‘Easy Rider (Let the Wind Pay the Way)’ was the American single, with Ingle singing, and reached number 66 in the United States and number 48 in Canada. ‘Free Flight’ is the album’s instrumental, and on the promotional pressing it runs forty seconds. ‘Butterfly Bleu’ closes the record with Mike Pinera on lead vocal; the sources give its length as either thirteen minutes fifty-seven or fourteen minutes three, depending on the pressing.

Reception and legacy

Number 16 on the Billboard 200 and number 31 in Canada, with no certification listed and no sales figure traced. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, reviewing for AllMusic, gave it three out of five and wrote that the group continued its musical explorations while adding a layered production to its sound — a fair description, and one that manages to say nothing about whether it worked. It is the last Iron Butterfly album with a documented placing inside the American top twenty. The band played their last show of this era at a community college in Bend, Oregon on 23 May 1971 and broke up.

The verdict

Metamorphosis is a better record than the circumstances suggest and a strange one to place. It is not the psychedelic band of 1968, it is not the song-writing band of 1969, and it is not quite the hard rock band the two new guitarists point toward. What it is is the last album by the original core of this group, made with a real producer and more care than anything around it. The closing piece is worth the price on its own, and Mike Pinera is a genuinely different singer from Doug Ingle rather than a substitute for him.

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