If you’ve read my DOMINUS XUL album review and interview long time ago you will already be aware of the fact that I totally worship these guys’ work to the max! So, as you can probably imagine I got totally excited when I heard that Corvus Discos had released a compilation of the band’s pre-album material. If you aren’t aware of these Chilean Death Metal gods yet, you should simply imagine the best elements of old INCANTATION ("Onward To Golgotha") or IMMOLATION (demos and "Dawn Of Possession") and you’ll already get a pretty good idea of how great these guys’ music was: very effective, devastating riffing, a mixture of fast and doomy elements, a very deep grunted, yet very strong vocal delivery and a very occult overall atmosphere. Most of the material on this compilation was still released under their previous moniker DOMINUS (a band that rose out of the ashes of the two Chilean bands SADISTIC LEGION and GENOCIDE in 1991-1992). In detail that means their debut demo "The Occult Lords Of Torment", which came out in 1994 on Toxic Records, the promo rehearsal "Kur" from 1995 (which you get as a rough mix and direct studio mix on here) and the "Desencadenando Las Negras Profecías De Los Ancestros" EP (released by Deifer Records back in 1997), which is surprisingly featured with its English title "Unchaining The Ancient’s Black Prophecies" on here. After the release of that EP the band changed their name into DOMINUS XUL and in 2000 they went on to unleash their incredible debut full length "The Primigeni Xul (I Condemned My Enemies)" on Picoroco Records. Unfortunately DOMINUS XUL already had to call its quits again in late 2000 because of the death of their singer Danny Grave, but it seems that they have reformed recently with members from (o.a.) TRIMEGISTO, MELEKTAUS and THORNAFIRE, so hopefully we will get another full length of them sometime soon! The sound quality of the material on this CD here is surprisingly good (if you consider that it already dates back to 1994 – 1997), while the black and white CD booklet turned out a little disappointing to me (all you get is a bio and thanks list, both written in Portuguese though, very little info on each recording and a little photo collage)… but in the end the music definitely makes up for that, so make sure to get yourself a copy of this! More info at www.myspace.com/dominusxuloficial. Ordering details you may find here: www.corvusdiscos.cl