Beef Terminal

After nearly two years, Beef Terminal (aka Mike Matheson) rematerialises with The Grey Knowledge, a sharper, more cleanly produced follow-up to the raw and eerily lo-fi, yet superb, 20 GOTO 10. This time around, Matheson displays his talent for composing well-crafted guitar melodies with elaborately sequenced drum programming and even covers the Eurythmics' "This City Never Sleeps." Matheson elaborates, "Putting the Eurythmics cover on was something that I had to think about because I hadn't done anything with vocals before. The original song reminds me of my childhood when I was really into the Eurythmics and I think a lot of the feeling of that song comes through in my Beef Terminal stuff. The original has spooky sounds and always freaked me out as a kid, so I tried to do the same thing, only more spooky." Despite the absence of the lo-fi aesthetic, some of the familiar elements of 20 GOTO 10 surface on this recording, such as disembodied voices culled from analog cell phone ether and a prevailing eerie mood, only this time there are also rays of optimism, like on "Enter And Leave With Nothing" and "Red Sky Take Warning." And much of the emotions on this album mirror the feelings of the man behind Beef Terminal. "I wanted to retain the same feel of 20 GOTO 10 while still moving forward. I lost the plot a bit to the point where I actually finished The Grey Knowledge a year ago and worked on other stuff. When I went back to it I heard the sounds of someone who was trying to please everyone but himself. I had received some unexpected attention for 20 GOTO 10 and that messed with my mind for a bit. I scrapped a bunch of tracks and added new ones. I kept a journal on my web site about the recording of the album and when I look back on it I laugh about how seriously I was taking everything at times." However, this is precisely this sort of inner turmoil and self-questioning that makes The Grey Knowledge such a success.