In very few occasions a band really makes me wonder “how am I going to compare them?” yes the question is quite annoying to many if not all musicians, but I really like to give a point of reference to the readers out there; Pneuma is one of those extremely hard bands to label, some call them progressive thrash, but to be honest the thrash sounds are few and they only emerge for a couple of seconds not really giving the album a thrash foundation, but with the progressive label maybe we are getting somewhere (that’s the great thing about the “progressive” label, it pretty much puts in a box everything unconventional).

“A Run Through” is a blend of sounds and rhythms that can take you back to the golden age of prog rock without loosing its metal taste; there are those couple of songs that really don’t offer much to the overall production but they don’t hurt it either, like in the second track “Small” a nice mellow instrumental track (most of the songs don’t have vocals and that’s a good thing!) that helps enhance the expectations after a nice heavy first song as “Descend” is.

Pneuma shows in every track a very nice, conscious ability to play their instruments, really talented guys, but there are those few instants were for some reason they decided to place some horrible atmospheric sound that totally destroys a song; a perfect example is “Dementia” were a sort of electric organ comes into play, really an awful thing to listen, the good thing is after that the guitar takes over with solos, and melodic riffs that blend between progressive and rock n roll, giving the track something to look forward to, even when they sort of extended the song just for the purposes of showing of the kind of things they can do, not really a bad thing, just a bit unnecessary.

Like every other costarrican underground band, the production was done the best they could, but sadly it doesn’t reach the level that a band like Pneuma deserves, there are songs where the drums sound awful, raw and dry, like in a home made necro black metal tape from the early 90’s… well maybe not really like a necro black tape, but still pretty bad; this only happens in a couple of songs not in all, so not sure if it is a production mistake, a bad decision or simply a different recording place.

The vocal work, at least the hardcore like vocal work is pretty good, the mellow voice is not bad is just badly placed, it sort of carry an extremely simple rhythm, and this would not have been a bad thing if the guitars weren’t so complicated.

To wrap it up… Pneuma sounds like a band with a big future, because of the incredible amount of ideas on “A Run Through” maybe too many ideas, you can’t really “get” the band just by listening to the album, since every song is so extremely different from one another, so lets just wait, this was the debut, talented intelligent but a bit misguided, let’s wait and see how they might surprise us in the future.