Review Summary: An unlikely trio of musicians craft one of the best slices of Americana this side of the Mississippi.
I should preface this review by pointing out that this album is well outside of my normal listening habits. Maybe my general unfamiliarity with music of this style will invalidate my praise of it, or maybe the fact that it managed to grasp me despite not being my usual genre will speak to its quality. I'll leave that up to the reader.
So, Dyad. Somehow, a three piece from Canada, two of its members Japanese, came together to make an album that sounds straight out of Appalachia, and they did it in 2004. Or possibly 2001, information on Dyad and this album is anemic, to the say the least. Outside of a few brief mentions on websites for local music festivals, there's not much out there, which is made all the more baffling thanks to Who's Been Here Since I've Been Gone being a downright stellar album, full of beautiful musicianship and the kind of heartfelt performances that only come by as often as the local flax scutching festival.
The recording of Who's Been Here... can be a little jarring at first for listeners in headphones thanks to the vocals being done in a binaural fashion, with Kori's nasal tenor on the left side and Leah's breathy alto on the right, but that's all part of the atmosphere of the album. The recording overall seems very carefully imaged, giving the music a feeling of sitting around a fire listening to musicians sitting around you rather than attending a concert with the performance being up on stage a distance away. Additionally, each song was recorded as a single take, with no punch-in or later editing together, which gives them a feeling of cohesion that all the careful editing in the world can't duplicate.
Musically, Who's Been Here... runs the gamut of bluegrass/folk style moods. There are story songs (Omie Wise), chipper instrumentals (Getting George Bush Upstairs), and melancholic tales of lost love (O Molly Dear). These are not original compositions, generally being traditional Americana tunes, but what makes Dyad's renditions special is the emotional heft that the three musicians impart upon them along with the gorgeous harmonies Leah and Kori create. O Molly Dear is the album's highlight, taking a normally swift banjo ditty and dialing the tempo down, with plaintive violins and the gentle banjo plucking creating a backdrop for the lyrics to be delivered in a way that's almost reminiscent of a funeral dirge, mourning the love it describes.
I'm sure anyone familiar with this style of music knows these songs frontwards and backwards, and in my time trying to research the band (again, there's very little information on them out there) I listened to several versions of the songs contained in Who's Been Here... but, no matter how good those other renditions were, Dyad's remain special. What we have here is a "traditional" album that entrenches itself in the aesthetic of the style without either blindly mimicking the originals nor modernizing it away from the heart and soul of what made the songs so potent in the first place. Who's Been Here... truly is an album that exists outside of its time and place. It's not a throwback, it's not contemporary, it's an encapsulation of all of it.
It really is a shame Dyad disbanded after this, or maybe they were never a "band" in the traditional sense as it seems the various musicians are out there doing other endeavors. But for that one moment, they came together and created something truly special.
