CD Review

You can't fault The Pnuma Trio for its nerve: another keyboard-plus-rhythm-section jamtronica live album? Does the amorphous genre have room for one more, especially one that at first listen bears so much resemblance to the New Deal, Lotus, and the rest?

That'd be a "yes." Pnuma's Live from Out There delivers goods you know already, but then you listen all the way through nine tasty tracks and suddenly it's over…and neither your focus nor your interest has waned.

Carpers might call that a sign of flimsiness—generic and unassuming enough of a dance record to do a familiar job and make itself as ephemeral as the nights on which these tracks were recorded. Whatever, they're not listening; drummer Lane Shaw, keyboardist Ben Hazlegrove, and bassist Alex Botwin like to get way up inside their grooves and carve them out from within. Their jams aren't so much tension-and-release buildups as they are three guys throwing up a soundscape and then wrestling its shape into other contortions. "Robot," for example, begins as greasy keyboard funk and morphs into a long gullet of trance. Both "Air" and "Tall Tree" become bust-out house after, respectively, long stretches of disco rock and something trippier, sloppier, and keys-heavy.

If Pnuma has a pattern, it's the New Deal-ish tendency to drop the floor out or play chicken with near trainwrecks and almost-collapsing left turns. Then again, they avoid the New Deal's occassional erraticism by staying longer on certain ideas. Different strategies, same mother, and they both work.

For more information, check out the Pnuma Trio website.