Turning terror into tunes

For Daniel Lyon, better known by his stage name Spirit Award, music creation is a very personal and intimate act that is therapeutic in nature and offers peace of mind. His latest album, The Fear, which hit streaming platforms in May, does exactly that, exploring many of his rawest emotions of anxiety, love, anger, sadness and of course fear, all of which Lyon expresses with a very exciting and energetic musicality.

Lyon sets the stage from the very first moments with the song “The Shadow,” stating “The fear is creeping in… and it never goes away,” mentioning this fear for the first time on the album, but certainly not the last. Lyon subsequently mentions his fears on tracks like “Pushing Forward” which deals with anxiety from ingesting different substances, and most obviously the album’s namesake, “The Fear,” which describes how shadows and things moving at night have convinced the narrator of the existence of the supernatural. Lyon expresses all of his other emotions throughout the album as well, on tracks like “Fantasy” and “Want You Bad” that describe different convoluted affairs of love and lust and “South Dakota Cops” which is annoyed, angry and full of resentment for law enforcement as a whole.

The emotions spread across the album’s 10 tracks is represented musically with as much rawness and as much energy as the emotions themselves. With very few exceptions, all of the vocals, guitars, bass and drums are bathed in overdrive and forge a sound that is hot and energetic, acting as a perfect reflection for Lyon’s lyrics. There are certainly moments that differentiate themselves from the immense overdrive, like the very relaxed outro of “Fantasy”, and then there are songs like “Guilt and Shame” that really lean into the overdriven sound to the point where the instruments sound like they’re trying to shout over one another to get the point across. In any other circumstance this could be seen as a mistake, but Lyon knows what he is doing and uses the feedback as an artistic tool.

The instrumentation on this record is very tasteful as well, with memorable riffs found in songs like “Western Violence” being played by the bass in the intro, and on “Want You Bad” with its Baba O’Riley-esque synth intro and sighing guitar riff. Another stand-out instrumental moment is the constant tremolo used on the guitar on the intro of “South Dakota Cops,” emulating the flutter of a police helicopter, echoing the song’s sentiment.