Buried Treasure, October 23

By Adeem Bingham, Buried Treasure Editor

Happy Spooky Month, babies. It’s Dr. Adeem here with a brand new swath of songs for yins (I don’t know – it just seemed like I was riding the medication metaphor pretty hard.)

This week we’ve got Tri-Cities favorite Beth Snapp, the soft emotional devastation of Tender Creature, radio country rock by way of Australiana, and the delicious folk harmonies of Ruby Mack. 

It’s accidentally pretty much all women this week – like my ballot was! Make sure y’all get out and make your voices heard. Find respite where you can from all the toxic rhetoric, and if you find yourself in need of some sort of prescription, well here we are again…

— Adeem

Beth Snapp

Beth is from my part of the woods. She’s a songwriter whose soulful folk ballads are swaddled in a rich earnestness. Blending pop sensibilities with banjo and fiddle, her new album is reminiscent of Old Crow Medicine Show or the Lumineers. Earlier in the year as we all reeled from the news that there would be no in-person Pride celebrations, Beth worked with the Tri-Cities Pride folks to produce a cover of “Higher Love” that is tender and spotlights queer locals. It even has a guest appearance from the inimitable Dave Eggar (Evanescence).

Tender Creature

Steph Bishop and Robert Maril create the inventive and stylistically deviant music of Tender Creature. Blending synth, acoustic guitars, and a warm string section, their new single “An Offering” is a soft and relentlessly emotional track full of poetry. The first time I heard Cyndi Lauper sing “All Through The Night” I burst into tears while I was driving. It was like it triggered some memory I couldn’t quite recall and I missed things I never had. That is the level of sort of wordless power this track holds. It’s jarringly distinctive and somehow universal. 

Little Wise

Sophie Klein is a Melbourne songwriter who invokes the ghost of Tom Petty with her overdriven, juicy-hooked flavor of Americana (Australiana?). “Want It All” is a hard hitting album full of well-crafted driving songs but right now, I’m sitting in the stew of her Bruce Springsteen cover. It appears on her new collection of live recordings entitled, “I really want to see you- and you see me” which is a sentiment I think all of us artists have grappled with to varying degrees of lucidity and sobriety over these blurred stretches. 

Ruby Mack

Set on reclaiming the story of Adam & Eve from a feminist perspective, Ruby Mack (named after their regions famous McIntosh apple) has created a subversive album full of quiet ruminations on identity and gender roles. And, of course, they did it inside of an old church. The production is simple, the harmonies color the lyrics well, and the fiddle is delightful. The full album is released today so hurry up and you can be one of the first ones to listen to this beauty.