Greetings and welcome to Bleeding Priest’s Bay Area Metal Spotlight. I still haven't thought of a better name, so I'm open to suggestions. If any of you think of something better, go ahead and leave a comment or hit me up on my socials.
For this edition, we will be talking about Ulysses Siren. If you're not familiar with them, quite frankly, they're one of the greatest thrash metal bands you may have never heard of. An incredible band from San Francisco, their heyday was from around 1983 to 1987 or maybe 1988. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to see them in their original run—they broke up right when I started going to shows. I remember they played The Stone with Nuclear Assault, and I was planning on going to that show, but I got in trouble at school, was grounded, and it wasn’t meant to be.
I do love their album Above the Ashes. It compiles their two demos: Terrorist Attack from 1985 and their second demo from 1987 or 1988, which I think was self-titled. These two demos were later put onto one vinyl package that came out in the mid-2000s. The musicianship and songwriting were light-years ahead of any band around at the time. Just incredible music.
I actually had the honor of playing with Ulysses Siren when they reformed in the mid-2000s, shortly before this compilation came out. In my 41 years of drumming, these were the most difficult songs I had ever had to learn—and still to this day. I was staying up at night, racking my brain, trying to figure out how some of these beats and arrangements worked. It wasn’t just the drum beats, which were incredible—the original drummer, Steve Huser, was the best drummer in San Francisco’s metal scene. He was better than all of his peers, in my opinion. Learning his beats was tough, but even more difficult were the song arrangements. These guys wrote wacky, complex songs that definitely didn’t fit the normal verse-chorus verse-chorus structure. There were all kinds of extra details, bells and whistles that made the songs unique—and extremely challenging to learn.
That said, it was a blast playing these songs. I went to Europe with them, and we played the Headbangers Open Air festival in Germany, along with a headlining show at the Hamburg Ballroom. Unfortunately, Ulysses Siren just wasn’t meant to last. They originally broke up in 1988 due to a lot of infighting and some serious substance abuse problems among certain members. That all culminated in a fistfight on stage at The Stone, which I’ve heard about from multiple band members. I would have loved to have seen that—maybe it even happened at that Nuclear Assault show.
When we reformed and went to Europe, things were going great, but it wasn’t meant to last that time either. Some of the old tensions from the past resurfaced, and the situation became dysfunctional again. I bowed out, and shortly after, I joined Death Angel.
Playing those songs was a challenge, but it was also an honor. The music was incredible. Manuel "Manny" Lopez’s vocals were amazing—very Tom Araya-style, aggressive thrash, but with a complexity that made Ulysses Siren stand out. If you like your thrash to be challenging—not in a way that’s hard to listen to, but challenging in terms of figuring out what the hell they’re doing—then you should check them out. In my opinion, their two demos are some of the best I’ve ever heard, and they were one of the greatest thrash bands to ever come out of San Francisco.
So, check out Ulysses Siren!