Iron Butterfly Albums Ranked

Iron Butterfly is an American rock band best known for the 1968 hit “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”, providing a dramatic sound that led the way towards the development of hard rock and heavy metal music. Formed in San Diego, California, among band members who used to be “arch enemies”, their heyday was the late 1960s, but the band has been reincarnated with various members with varying levels of success, with no new recordings since 1975. The band’s seminal 1968 album In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was a best-seller. Iron Butterfly was the first group to receive an In-House platinum album award from Atlantic Records. Here are all of Iron Butterfly albums ranked.

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9. Sun And Steel (1975)

“Sun and Steel was a last gasp effort that had no business succeeding under these circumstances, but succeed it does, and brilliantly. If there were any justice in the world, this album would be hailed as one of the greatest hard-rock efforts of the 70s. Two factors make the difference: John Ryan’s production and Bill DeMartines’ incredible keyboard playing (though all the members of the band perform superbly).”

8. Scorching Beauty (1975)

“I find this outstanding artwork refreshing from today’s rather unimaginative covers that feature your basic music star in either a thuggish or provocative pose that is embellished thanks to the miracle of photoshop. The days of actual art, of original imagination seem to be fading away as the years go flying past us, but at least Iron Butterfly showed that with their original music, they also had an eye for art.”

7. Light & Heavy: The Best Of Iron Butterfly (1993)

“The CD opens with the “Iron Butterfly Theme,” an instrumental that sets the stage for what is to come. Hint: if you listen closely at the end of the track, you will hear the phrase “I Love You” played by Doug Ingle on the organ in Morse Code.”

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6. Live (1970)

“Most of my favorite Iron Butterfly songs are on this album and I like these live versions better than the studio recordings. They have more energy and emotion than the originals.”

5. Ball (1969)

“BALL is a wonderful listening experience. The instruments and the sounds they make are refreshing there’s a precision and placement in space that rewards careful and repeated listens. The songs are well thought out and rehearsed. Every instrument is given room to shine in each individual manner. THE grooves are too numerous and varied to grow irksome or muddled like much of their contemporaries”

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4. Fillmore East 1968 (2011)

“Iron Butterfly show themselves to be a virtuoso, charismatic quartet, capable of holding a stage and a listener for an hour at a time — between Doug Ingle’s organ arabesques and Erik Brann’s Hendrix-influenced lead guitar, there’s plenty of bluesy psychedelic flexing going on, all of it backed by Lee Dorman’s imposing bass and Ron Bushy’s relentless percussion fills.”

3. Metamorphosis (1970)

“This album captures a mood…a mood of the time that it was created in. To me this music reaches back and embraces the Earth and it’s feelings, in the face of the oncoming ‘space-age’. Here is a trip to ‘inner space’! Each song is an expression of human reality, i.e. politics, drugs, motorcycles, soldiers, sex, friendship, DDT and the ultimate question: Do we actually die? or Do we metamorphosize?”

2. Heavy (1968)

“The sound quality is a bit muddy at times, and a few of the performances resemble rough drafts which were never expanded upon or finished. But there are some killer tracks included on this album. The trademark Butterfly sound is already in place, and Doug Ingle sounds good. No, he’s not Robert Plant or even Jim Morrison. But he emotes with a raw passion that certainly comes through here, devoid of pretense. When the band backs him up, vocally, they sound similar, and the voices mesh well. No, DeLoach wasn’t the best vocalist on the planet.”

1. In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (1968)

“This is the kind of music that brings back so many pleasant memories as well as enjoyment of the sounds of times gone by. This will make anyone want to remember what they were doing, with whom and how much they enjoyed this era.”