Genre: Black metal
Origin: Latvia
Released: 2007
Website: Dark Domination
Label: Witchcraft Productions
Uploaded: 18.09.09

To be honest I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of Dark Domination before, at least I don’t think I have. But it’s a Latvian black metal band that’s been around in one way or another since 1997, and this is a re-release of their debut fullength from 2005. What becomes painfully clear as soon as you put the disc in your player is that the track list doesn’t add up. I hate that, it’s really an extremely annoying issue for me. Ten songs are listed in the track list, yet seventeen tracks are present. I can’t find any useful information on the subject except every other track is supposedly just named 666. I suppose it’s these tracks that are the boring, useless ambient ones…
Yeah, ambience is not my thing, and there’s a total of eight tracks that are just ambience. Sure, there are slight variations in between the 666 tracks, but quite frankly most of them could just as well be the same boring three minutes over and over again. I’d much rather skip the intro and ambience, which would lessen the length of the album with more than twenty minutes. And I guess that’s what the original release was like, so why screw up the re-release like that, it’s not like they’ve added any interesting bonus tracks; just plain noise you can hear from a humming air-condition unit.
So let us skip that shit and focus on what’s at hand; the black metal. It’s definitely way more interesting than the ambience, but unfortunately not very. The drumming is so rigid it’s numbing. Everything’s set in one constant pace, with only some minor exceptions. It’s a stale, medium fast pace that would make the drummachine of Mortician sound groundbreaking. It’s just such mindless repetition. At least there’s some variation present. But as soon as you’ve settled into a new tempo the repetitiveness comes back to take a big chunk of your keester. Riffing-wise they’re not really reinventing the wheel; nothing sticks with you after the record’s over and it’s never even slightly eyebrow-raising. It’s mostly just going through the motion and it feels like you’ve heard everything so many times before. The gnarly screams at least add some roughness to their sound, and would be fitting a raw black metal approach.
I know a lot of people will call this trve, kvlt and such nonsense, but to me it’s highly uninteresting. I’ve heard way better black metal before, but I’ve also heard way worse. It has its moments, like for instance the melodic opener to Forest’s secret (and I know that’s the track thanks to the lyrics being included). If you like repetitiveness in both ambience and black metal this is a sure bet, but I crave more to keep my focus.

Tracklist:
01. Intro: Beyond the gates of hell
02. Hordes of the godless
03. 666
04. Under the emperor's wings
05. 666
06. Satan's worshipper
07. 666
08. Let Satan speak through our lips
09. 666
10. Against the liar
11. 666
12. Forest's secret
13. 666
14. Servants of the black art
15. 666
16. Gloria tibi, Lucifer!
17. Isanda teenistuses