The Petals' first full-length release in nine years is the welcome return of a band that gave us a string of great post-paisley singles from 1989 to the mid 90s, and one of the best psych-pop albums of the 90s in "Parahelion". Interest in the band began to return after Cary Wolf's fine solo project Stuntz's Blue Leg Expedition was issued in 1997 by September Gurls resulting in Camera Obscura contacting Cary and Julia Wolf, fortuitously just as a brace of new Petals and SBLE recordings were being planned. "Butterfly Mountain" is the first fruits of this partnership. 

The 12 tracks on "Butterfly Mountain" reveal the Petals to be undiminished as crafters of insidious melodies, complex lyrics, and recordings that are deceptively simple but constructed with the precision of Swiss watchmaker. As with Green Pajamas, the Dipsomaniacs (Norway) and Lazily Spun, vintage psychedelic pop and folk-rock elements are used as a vehicle for the writers' unique artistic visions and not as an end in themselves. Cary's Wolf's reconstructed hippie imagery runs the gamut from playful to profound whether constructing tales of colliding absurdities ("Brown Cow"), surreal collecting fetishes and dream mechanisms ("Seed Separator") or the simple pleasures of gathering ("Place in the Shade", "Sarsaparilla" and the title track). Offsetting Cary Wolf's essentially optimistic worldview, Laurie Kern and Steve Lines contribute the atypical but haunting "Pallid Mask" and Laurie collaborates with Wolf on "Living Room", where mental illness and Lewis Carroll get acquainted. 

"Butterfly Mountain" is comprehensively successful in what it sets out to do, and should appeal to lovers of psychedelic pop in all its forms across the decades.