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Spirit Award creates a sense of surrealism on Muted Crowd

Release date: October 19th, 2018

Dan Ray October 19, 2018
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Spirit Award creates a sense of surrealism on Muted Crowd October 19, 2018

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Frontman Daniel Lyon on stage during Spirit Award’s Capitol Hill Block Party 2018 set. // Photo by Dan Ray

On Spirit Award’s sophomore album, Muted Crowd, each song is a masterpiece. From track one, “Witching Hour,” a tune with a driving bass beat; to “Supreme Truth,” the lead single from the album; to “Second Shot,” which ends the 10-track journey with a high-pitched drone that creates an open, angelic sound, each piece is clearly well-thought-out, beautifully mixed, and masterfully played.

It’s difficult to break Muted Crowd down into individual songs, because the album rides on the complete immersion of the listener into the surrealist world created track by track. When we talked to Spirit Award back in September about this upcoming release, all three band members — vocalist and guitarist Daniel Lyon, bassist Chris Moore, and drummer Terence Ankeny — expressed that Muted Crowd has much more worldly themes than their debut, Neverending, such as the cult-like feel of the lead single from Muted Crowd, “Supreme Truth,” which showcases the band romping through the woods with other always-smiling, sometimes-barefoot peers dressed in white from head to foot.

And while “Supreme Truth” is track three, the music works to pull you blindly into it from the start. Lyon’s lilting voice careens softly throughout each tune, and the way it’s mixed in creates an extremely open, psychedelic, lying-in-the-grass-star-gazing-at-17-years-old-with-your-significant-other-and-the-world-is-just-small-and-perfect type of feeling. Together with Ankeny’s light, but ever present, driving drum beats, it’s like Lyon’s voice is Ted Bundy’s beautiful face — pulling you in and putting you at ease — and Ankeny’s drums are the hammer that comes down after you’ve already given in to his advances.

Muted Crowd is incredibly rhythm based, though (apart from Ankeny’s drums, Moore’s bass is a necessary, consistent rhythmic presence), so African polyrhythms might be a less-terrifying comparison: drum circles often have spiritual purposes, transporting the players and listeners to a higher mental place, or, at the very least, feeling present in the moment. Muted Crowd manages to pull on those same wavelengths, the album has a way of creating space for the listener to feel alive.

Either way, by track seven, when Lyon beckons “can you swim with me / in my time of need?,” I’m jumping into the water.

However, Muted Crowd, with its intricate rhythms and extraordinarily subtle differences between tracks, is not made for the casual listener. Because of its heavy dependence on differing rhythms and the form in which Lyon’s vocals slide over the tracks, giving this album a cursory listen, plain and simply, just wouldn’t work. On first listen, it was difficult to tell the tracks apart. It wasn’t until at least the fifth time through Muted Crowd that I really began to understand the subtle ebb and flow of the album. It’s apparent that this is Spirit Award’s goal, though: the brainwashed, floating-on-air feeling wouldn’t penetrate as deeply if the tracks were any more dissimilar. And after a dozen times through, the album began to feel more like a classic novel — unappreciated at first glance, but notable in later stages.

Yet, each track truly is a masterpiece and would have no trouble standing on its own. It’s a curious thing Spirit Award has done, creating an album that is only complete as a whole but where each piece still has something unique to say. It’s like the message is hidden underneath the tracks: each song says something different, but, when you put them all together, they uncover something new. Whether that “something new” is the spiritual nature of drum circles or the subconscious mind of Ted Bundy, well, that’s for the listener to decide.

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).