Dominion
Divine Revolution

February 2007
Released: 2006, Uho Production
Rating: 3.5/5
Reviewer: Luxi Lahtinen

Russia is becoming more and more known by the vast legions of metal bands that are popping up from that country all the time. Not only Aria, the most known metal band of all Russian metal bands by their very Maiden-inspired metal, has opened lots of doors to the unknown territories of Russian metal, but also band like Master, Korrozia Metalla, Kruiz, Black Obelisk, Miscreant and many others as well. And there´s of course many more to come, too.



From St. Petersburg crawls out a Dark Metal band (with twists to both Gothic - and Black Metal) that calls their music Dark Metal added with a mixture of neo-classical elements. No need to comment that description any further as in honest my opinion it fits to them well enough. The band is Dominia, and this sextet´s trip to Finland in February 2006 to record the debut album DIVINE REVOLUTION at Sound Supreme Studio - and having the known Finnish producer Janne Saksa to produce them, turned out to be a very successful trip all in all.



DIVINE REVOLUTION, containing 9 songs, speaks for the band´s strong song writing abilities to write catchy enough stuff to satisfy the needs of most Dark Metal -fans. Casper, who´s the main song writer in the band, has truly shown his sharp claws as a talented guy to write some really good and easily adopted songs that don´t need an extra effort of concentrating to catch fully them from start to finish. The band can easily go from one extreme to another, sounding like a flock of vicious ravens after for your fresh flesh tissue at one moment whereas on the other hand, they are able to reveal you all the beauty of Heavy Metal at other moment (much thanks to coloring their darkened metal with certain doses of violins and keyboards). Moonspell´s WOLFHEART –era comes to slightly to my mind if one needs some comparison points. With a very good production of Janne Saksa it makes even easier to catch the songs for listeners, so the band members in Dominia can definitely be proud of achieving something this good on their debut record.



I don´t feel necessary to go specifying any songs by name that might top each other for this and that reason as I overall think all songs are somewhat equally good on this album, creating a relatively bombastic wholeness together. It´s also a good thing that the Russian metal scene has a noteworthy pile of worth checking out bands ready in the line that can answer to the somewhat tough standards of international metal scene. Dominia are one of those bands that have a good chance to break into the international metal scene by this release if they just get a good promotional network behind them. At least they would deserve it.