On their Myspace, 3 Headed Monster describe their music: ‘it sounds like if Hulk Hogan and Godzilla had a baby, brought it through wrestling school, had it do battle with tons of monsters and then taught it music theory and composition... And had its vocal chords surgically removed’. In other words it’s instrumental heavy slash power metal (and some other kinds of metal here and there), from Massachusetts in the United States. Three Headed Monster is the bands’ debut album and it’s quite good.

It is pretty surprising to not hear a vocalist in the midst of the metal, but 3HM covers said vocal space with lots of instrumental goings on and a couple of different vocal samples, probably taken from ‘giant monster movies’.
Most importantly on and instrumental release of course: the instruments. Whereas the bass and drums are a solid backdrop, the main ingredient is of course guitar. 3HM has (actually had, they’re presently looking for a new one) two guitarists, shredding their way through the songs. Chris Kessaris and Chris Cechhini play pretty impressive riffs and solo’s throughout the album. The whole CD brings to mind 1980’s Metallica. Not at all a bad thing. It’s like stepping into a time machine. Also, you can really imagine the band could be quite spectacular to see live on stage.
The eight songs on this CD are well structured and at the right length.

So, you won’t get bored, which is likely with instrumental music. They also keep things interesting by putting in some prog parts and every now and then a death metal like bit.
Of those tracks, the closer is best. ‘Engines of AKI’ has a lot of different parts and paces that all interchange naturally. Most of all the song it features beautiful and original guitarplay both in solo’s (especially at 3:50 into the song, oh boy, is that nice and crafty) and riffs. ‘Engines of AKI’ also has extra nice drums, with a bunch of double-kick stuff going on. During this six and a half-minute song you can envision all kinds of things, for it all sounds very expressive. I could really go nuts with the description, saying things like: you can see some great apocalyptic battle going on between, say, giant robots, monsters, aliens and humans or something. But I won’t, suffice it to say this is a great song.
Also, the production is quite good, although at times it lacks an edge, but on the whole it works pretty well.

Maybe some of the songs in the middle of the album are less interesting, but all in all one can’t say many bad things about 3 Headed Monster’s, ‘Three Headed Monster’. It’s a very good record, although given its instrumental nature it will take some getting used to for most.