Spinal Records are like a premier label for the Belgian scene with a limited amount of quite interesting releases on its roster in mean time. You can find some reviews on Concreteweb for bands just like Exuviated (update of December 28th 2015), Hell City (see upload December 1st 2014), Drakkar (November 10th 2014) or Deepshow (published on April 29th 2015). Now they come up with a release by KomaH – it’s this band’s third album, by the way.
KomaH consisted of vocalist Leny Andrieux, drummer Jonas Sanders (one of the better Belgian drummers lately!), guitar players Greg Discenza and Luigi Chiarelli, and bass player Nicholas Brynin at the time of this recording. The album was recorded at the Atomika Studios with Marc De Keyzer, mixed with Charles De Schutter (Rec N’ Roll Studio), and mastered via Warner Music Hungary with Tamas Gresicki. Twelve tracks eventually made it to the album, which clocks forty-four minutes.
Flashing Nightmare opens with the short intro Genesis, which mingles different sounds and samples – superfluous and unnecessary, I am afraid. But that isn’t but a minimal detail, for this album has much more to offer than just that. With Flashing Nightmare, KomaH bring a modern, extremely grooving and rocking form of Post / Half-Thrash with somewhat ‘melodious’ shouts, speedy soloing, a couple of dissonant structures, Hardcore-oriented riffage, Metalcore-oriented melodies, and so much more. Despite having some new members in the recording line-up, I sort of reveal an increased level of ‘arousal’ in their play, which isn’t but a positive thing, because it gets translated in the sonic result too. Besides, I think that it is truly a surplus that this band often slows down in their play. Many bands within this specific niche try to ‘convince’ (yeah, whatever) with fast-paced outbursts; KomaH are able to combine power with both faster and slower passages, with both violent outbursts and semi-integer melodies. And okay, it does not promise originality, for there is quite some ear candy à la Machine Head, Spoil Engine or Dagoba – even Fear Factory, Pro-Pain, Meshuggah, later Pantera or Trivium might be references from time to time.
And oh yes, with the last song, The Void, KomaH did create a monster of a track, combining, at the one hand, all the better aspects that floated through the other songs, but with quite some more opportunities: funky bass lines, melancholic melodies, and a majestic finale, with inclusion of mesmerizing synths towards the end…