“All men are lost (in) the way that all men are lost,” sings History At Our Disposal’s Jason Reimer. Although it sounds as though he’s pointing the finger at the world at large, this indictment includes Reimer himself. Confused by mortality, lost love, artistic anxiety and nostalgia, Reimer and his Denton-based outfit navigate their way through Symbols In The Architecture’s thirteen compositions with a steady uneasiness. Tracks start and stop in fits and bursts (“Nature Of Orientation”), layers of acoustic guitars give way to restless backbeats (“The Black Forest”) and Reimer holds court over it all in a wobbly whisper that rises to an almost primal scream. “To The Spoiler The Spoils” is a nervous number that eerily reveals, “There’s something growing in the forests of the Midwest/It’s well-watered and can’t be stopped,” while the falsetto-tinged “Suspension of Disbelief” twitches away as Reimer tells us: “There’s a carrier aboard unannounced/ Driven deeper still into the woods.” Elsewhere, “Bed Of Leaves” is a fractured, but gently syncopated lullaby, buoyed by broken loops and beats; the moody “Letter From The Bottom Of The Sea” is powered by a dark and churning muscle; and the closer “Before You Were Born” finds Reimer confessing, “I have lived in another Time.” Nothing gets cleared up here; the world is still crashing around us and there’s nothing we can do about it. But Symbols In the Architecture reminds us that sometimes the real beauty comes from listening to the way things break.
--Alex Green
