HEAVY MUSIC HISTORY: Sirens – Savatage

For a group that would effectively mutate in to TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA, the early years of SAVATAGE couldn’t be further from the rock operas and progressive tendencies that would eventually define the band. At their inception, SAVATAGE were a straight-ahead, no frills heavy metal band. Although their debut album, Sirens, belies the epic beast the band would eventually become, it’s a fascinating look at a more vicious, nascent and ever so slightly immature version of one of metal’s most underrated acts.

Formed in Tarpon Springs, Florida, by the inimitable duo of brothers Jon and Criss Oliva, the band had made a name for themselves as AVATAR at the start of the ‘80s. While Jon would go on to often play huge swathes of the material himself on later SAVATAGE releases, at this point he was just the singer. Already boasting a formidable set of pipes, Jon was able to jump from snarled lows to screeching highs with ease. Criss took on guitar duties, with his riff-writing skills and lead guitar chops defining the band’s sound for the next decade or so. Part Eddie Van Halen and part Tony Iommi, Criss’s stamp on a song was absolutely distinctive, and the two brothers’ virtuosic talents established the creative core of AVATAR. The Olivas recruited a thundering rhythm section of Keith Collins and Steve Wacholz on bass and drums respectively, cementing the band’s first solid line-up. Under the AVATAR banner, the band made a name for themselves as a live act throughout the clubs across Tampa and Clearwater.

However, as another AVATAR already existed (no, not that AVATAR – obviously!), it wasn’t long before the band found themselves having to rebrand. The Olivas and company were reborn as SAVATAGE – just in time for recording their first full length album. The vast majority of the fifteen songs the band prepared for the recording were composed by the Oliva brothers, with one or two co-writing contributions from Collins and Wacholz. Reminiscing in 2010, Jon commented that most of the songs were written over a four-to-five month period, but were never quite finished. As the band could only afford a single day in the studio, Jon and Criss spent the preceding week hurriedly finishing up their bank of songs. With such limited time at Morrisound Recording booked (nowadays, known as an institution of American metal, although Sirens was effectively its metallic christening), SAVATAGE treated the recording experience like a live set, thrashing through as many songs as they could and keeping overdubs to a minimum. It’s both surprising and impressive in equal measure that SAVATAGE managed to lay down the amount of material that they did.

In fact, it was too much material. Six of the tracks had to be excised from their debut album due to constraints on running time, and were parked for a follow up EP – The Dungeons Are Calling (1985). Despite the year and a half gap between their releases, Sirens and The Dungeons Are Calling have forever been inextricably linked by fans. So much so, they were eventually officially compiled and re-released under one banner – The Complete Session – in 2011. Of the two releases, the shorter The Dungeons Are Calling would end up the more consistent. The menacing tone of its title track echoed by storming horror-story metal like City Beneath The Surface and occult musings in By The Grace Of The Witch showed SAVATAGE at their most vicious. The only duff track amongst them was the S&M themed The Whip, which is best forgotten about. But what about the nine songs that made the cut for Sirens itself?

Listening to the album nowadays, and considering the long history of SAVATAGE that followed it, there’s a certain level of charming innocence to it all. By the very nature of how the album was recorded, the band’s overall performance has a low-fi, rough and tumble feel to it. The band themselves were still figuring out who they were, but there were plenty of hints of what they’d become peppered throughout. The unsettling title track, with its swaying lullabies of arpeggiated guitars, theatrical chiming of church bells and Jon Oliva’s increasingly maniacal vocal performance, still feels as heavy as heavy metal gets. Its frantic, fantastical imagery and guitar stomp would serve as a blueprint for one of SAVATAGE’s future opuses, The Hall Of The Mountain King. The biting, bent metal riffery of Holocaust on the other hand sets up a dramatic, fist-pumping ode to the apocalypse and has a direct throughline to later, slightly more grounded tracks like Of Rage And War. I Believe is replete with a stomping, generous offering of galloping, chuggy riffs that set the stage for a belted hook of a chorus – one of the album’s best – and some mind-blowing fretboard fury from Criss Oliva. Along with its thrashier follow-up Rage, I Believe effectively planted roots for a sound that SAVATAGE would go on to perfect on their next full-length, the blood-pumping Power Of The Night. Finally, the album’s closing pseudo-ballad Out On The Streets would clearly go on to inform the band’s late ‘80s shift into Broadway-tinged rock operas.

But for all those flashes of the future, Sirens also flirts with song-writing phases the band would move away from on subsequent releases. The element which sticks out most on a number of these tracks is the lyrical content. While some of the dark fantasy imaginings land well, there’s plenty of shlock-horror and “we’re so edgy” posturing across the record to boot. Speaking in 2010, Jon Oliva humbly admits, “I had never written lyrics before and suddenly I found myself with the need to write words for songs”. The results are varied – the vindictively horny Twisted Little Sister and slasher-flick Scream Murder have a particular teenage edgelord vibe to them. Although some of it feels a little throwaway. Sirens is ultimately the sound of a young and excited band chucking all of their ideas at the wall and seeing what would stick. While a far cry from the sprawling narratives and soul searching of future SAVATAGE releases, the strong musical backing remains surprisingly timeless.

Of course, 1983 turned out to be a landmark year for metal releases. And while Sirens seemed to fare well enough, particularly in Europe, it hasn’t had the staying power of stateside competition like Kill ‘Em All and Show No Mercy. Somewhere between Sirens and The Dungeons Are Calling was an absolutely essential metal album waiting to picked out – if only someone had told SAVATAGE “less is more” at the time. By itself though, Sirens is a flawed but important album, laying the foundation for what would become one of metal’s most unique acts.

Sirens was originally released on April 11, 1983 via Par Records.

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