Tereth – Curses Veiled as Voices

2008 • Disease Foundry Recordings

It's tough to find any information online about Tereth or their album Curser Veiled as Voices—let alone get one of the fifty CD-R copies that were pressed, and I can understand why it never really took off and got any recognition. It's just another blip in the enormous sea of second-rate ambient albums that aren't good or bad enough to be noticed, as it's a pretty amateurish recording that winds up simply being very dull, or at best something to put on just for the sake of having something to listen to.

The album has fairly minimalist sound; an interesting combination of dark ambient, drone, and an ever-so-slight post-rock influence that works decently. Guitar in ambient is a bit unusual so it's kind of cool to see it being used here. The production is handles pretty well and for what it's worth the album sounds pretty good overall.

However, it suffers—badly—from excessive repetition. Each track is set up in exactly the same way: droning ambient sounds punctuated by a slow clean guitar riff, repeated for the duration of each piece, and occasional heavily-processed voice samples. Since none of the tracks are too long it doesn't manage to get quite to the point of tedium, but there is practically nothing in the way of atmosphere- or tension-building to speak of, and since every track is practically the same there's nothing surprising or attention-catching that happens.

There really isn't much else to say about this album, as it has nothing to say itself. It's repetitive, safe, and above all simply boring. I can understand if it's an amateur experimental project but it's not something that is worthy of being released (at least, not at cost), and it's not really worth the time to listen to it. Maybe in a few more years after Tereth finds a good ground on making some more interesting ambient work will I gladly check out their music again, but until then I will relegate this release back to that sea of deservingly-unnoticed albums.

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