Hey Three Eyes is a band whose members got together one day and looked each other in the face and decided not to be boring. Bless their hearts.

Or maybe it wasn't a conscious decision, but a natural result of their sensibilities - classical guitar chops squeezed through red-hot migraine tones, boozy squeaks on top of rhythms that flip over and stumble on their own accord without any obvious cue, and the inclination to do all this about five times as fast as the next band would dare.  

Imagine that freaky fuzzy gremlin thing from the "Honeycomb" commercials except he has an eyepatch and is down with Japanese metal and gives even less of a fuck. He grew up in the glorious heyday of leather chaps and long flowing (men's) hair. His voice sounds like 10 year old Kim Gordon (not smoking yet, but oversexed even at that tender age) and his arms are made of quintuple-time riffs and generous portions of palm mutes. And his legs are stomping it all back home like a clock in hell. It's gonna be pretty hard to go back to setting the rock dial to anything below "Satan swallowed by a jet turbine."

Hey Three Eyes' live show is an example of zealous intention taking precedence over more distant concepts like taste or appropriateness. The guitarists stand there and play fucking Flying-V guitars while their right hands alternately flit like a moth and delicately pick vertigo-inducing octave riffs, and they're doing this in complete unison, taking instructions from some demon god flipping a coin: on one side it says "shred" and on the other it says "THRASH."

They may be dressed like women or sailors or zombies. You might be thinking that you don't normally listen to music like this but it's more likely that you'll be fantasizing about them playing your wedding. You probably won't even notice that there's no bass. You might have the impression that they seem to be just completely flipping out without any regard for coherence or notions of melody. And just when you're beginning to be cool with that, you'll notice that Hey Three Eyes in fact have songs, extremely complex songs, songs that could only be memorized by people who could be performing in respectable concert halls (in hell).

Immediately noticeable is the polar disparity between the rock coolness and the rock geekiness that this band exudes in equal parts. Like their forefathers, they squeeze these two ends of the spectrum together until it's clear that they are one and the same.  It's this quality, even beyond the fuzzed-out spaghetti riffs and thrashing drums, that unite the band with the soul of metal. Singer Zoe Lowe seems plastered and alive and diva-esque, screaming about some imagined psychic beast (probably) while guitarists Feliks and Scott mug comically through their synchronized "ZZ-Top's mutant meth freak child" routine, and Bookstein drums like he's a cartoon character laying down tracks just one step ahead of a rampaging train. The overall effect is an absurd patchwork monster of rock ideals.  

They think it's as funny as we do, which is a relief and enormously endearing, letting listeners and watchers drop their defenses and let themselves be moved in a way that wouldn't be possible with a more self-serious band.

This is part of the secret to Hey Three Eyes' appeal: they insinuate themselves into your senses, and the effect is unstoppable because they're so loud, so weird, so counterintuitive but mostly because they're so undeniably lovable. They're freaking out and wailing and licking and you just want to give them a hug (in hell).

[David Ford]