Excerpt: “What would happen if you took Red House Painters and gave them Wheaties before recording? Mukaizake’s languorous rhythms and stretched-out singing, as well as its minor-key melodies, do take a page from RHP. The songs hide a certain complexity, though, that might get them tagged as math-rock were the band to play them at twice their speeds. As it happens, playing somber math rock at half speed brings out subtleties that you might miss otherwise…. You barely notice that the band has been sneaking in the odd beat, the odd melody, the unusual attenuation of form because it’s always delivered fluidly and naturally. Maybe Mukaizake is best described as a thinking man’s slowcore.”

Delusions of Adequacy

“While listening to this, and contemplating the automobile artwork, you sit with ears and senses open, waiting for some guitar hook or divine melody to capture you and force you to hit repeat. It doesn’t come. See, it sounds like a pop release, but that’s the trick! Once you realise this you can begin appreciating Unknown Knowns for the interweaving guitars and all the space used by the drawn out arrangements as the mini-album/extended EP sublimely unfolds.”

Drum Media

Excerpt: “Being spread across three different states isn’t the most productive way to keep the band going. We always had in the back of our mind that we’d release those tracks that we’d recorded. But with Dan and I living away it was too hard to get into a position where we could finish it off and release it… Now we’re only dealing with two states in Australia instead of three, so it’s easy for us to fly Dan back for a show… It was actually quite nice revisiting the tracks that long after it. A lot of things came a long way in the mixing. We did a bit more production and got a bit more creative with how we approached them… No additional recording was done to finish the songs. Everything you hear on Unknown Knowns was recorded in 2004 and mixed in late 2009. The main thing that changed in the mixing of the record was that we took a lot out. We were one of those bands where everyone was playing all the time, and part of coming back and revisiting the record was, ‘Do we really need that part going for the whole song? Is it better pulling out some of those those bits, creating a bit more space?’”

Mess & Noise

Excerpt: “Unknown Knowns seems blissfully unaware of the anticipation that surrounds it; Mukaizake sound like a band that don’t feel they have anything to prove, whose humble goal is nothing more than to write and record the best possible songs they can, expectations be damned. Unknown Knowns more than lives up to the promise of its predecessor. These six songs are everything the band’s patient fans could have asked for, as well as being strong enough to introduce Mukaizake to a whole new audience.”

Mess and Noise