The Sisters of Mercy / Floodland (Deluxe Version) / 1985
Medley: Dominion / Mother Russia
ominous, ceremonial, and slowly building toward chant-like delirium
This medley fuses two separate Sisters of Mercy songs into one long, incantatory piece: a chant about power and faith called Dominion, followed by a fever-dream vision of Soviet Russia filtered through Cold War kitsch and paranoia. Both halves trade in apocalyptic grandeur, but where the first is abstract and liturgical, the second turns concrete and satirical, ending in a chanted plea addressed to a personified nation.
apocalyptic religiosity power and dominion Cold War paranoia propaganda and media spectacle decay of empires personal faith versus collective ideology
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an unnamed, intimate 'you' in the Dominion section, sounding like a prophet or preacher declaring private conviction against a backdrop of general dread; in the Mother Russia section the voice becomes a media-saturated observer, half tourist and half propagandist, describing a mythologized Soviet landscape from the outside.
What happens
The song opens in a close, almost domestic register of heat, fear, and intimacy before escalating into a mantra about the arrival of dominion and kingship, repeated until it feels less like a statement than a spell. Without warning the piece pivots into an entirely different scene: a surreal, Cold War tableau of lighthouses, red squares, and film crews, culminating in a repeated invocation calling on 'Mother Russia' to descend like rain.
How it's built
The track is explicitly a medley, stitching one song's verse-chorus form onto another's more narrative verses, with no real bridge to smooth the seam. Dominion relies on incremental anaphora and a chorus that mutates slightly each time it returns; Mother Russia abandons that mantra structure for denser, imagistic verses that collapse into a final chant, mirroring the way an argument gives way to prayer.
Section by section
Opening verse (Dominion)
“In the heat of the moment”
The speaker catalogs sensory and emotional extremes, closing eyes, meeting fear, hearing an unnamed voice, all compressed into a single charged instant. The intimacy of the address sits oddly against the grandiosity that follows, setting up a tension between private feeling and public proclamation.
Chorus (Dominion)
“Some day, some day, some day, Dominion”
The chorus functions as a countdown or promise rather than an argument, its repetition suggesting inevitability more than persuasion. The choice to say prayers 'my way' rather than someone else's marks a claim to personal authority even while borrowing wholly religious vocabulary.
Second verse (Dominion)
“gold to rust”
Images of desert landscapes, betrayal, and decaying value accumulate here, suggesting a world where currencies of trust and wealth are corroding. The reference to blindness and kingship pushes the verse toward a vision of tyranny emerging from moral or economic collapse.
Transition into Mother Russia
Without a formal bridge, the song drops its prophetic register entirely and adopts a drier, almost journalistic tone describing drought, isolation, and dreaming, introducing the second song's imagery of watchfulness and waiting before the Cold War material fully arrives.
Mother Russia verses
“Kino Runner for the DDR”
The speaker recasts himself as a figure inside a state-propaganda film, blurring the line between observer and participant. Cold War geography becomes theatrical set dressing, gold turning to chrome and revolutionary daughters reduced to spectacle, implying that ideology has become indistinguishable from media performance.
Closing chant
“Mother Russia rain down”
The song ends by treating the nation as a weather system or deity to be invoked, echoing the earlier prayer imagery from Dominion. The repetition strips away irony and leaves something closer to genuine supplication, however ambivalent its object.
Craft
- anaphora
- Repeated openings such as recurring 'in the heat of' and 'some day' phrases build ritual momentum, making the language feel liturgical rather than conversational.
- apocalyptic imagery
- References to kingship, prayer, and vast empty landscapes borrow the register of scripture and prophecy to inflate a personal or political claim into something cosmic.
- juxtaposition
- The abrupt jump from abstract, biblical language to specific Cold War iconography forces the listener to read the two halves against each other, as parallel forms of dominion.
- chant/incantation
- Both sections end in repeated, almost ritual phrases that function less as lyric content than as sound and gesture, turning the song into something closer to invocation than statement.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the medley as pairing two versions of the same idea: dominion as an internal, almost religious conviction in the first half, and dominion as external, geopolitical power in the second. Read this way, the personal chant of the opening section anticipates the collective, ideological chant of the closing one, suggesting that both faith and empire operate through repetition and surrender to something larger than the self. An alternative reading takes the two halves as simply juxtaposed rather than thematically fused, a stylistic pairing chosen for mood and scale rather than argument, in which case the Cold War imagery works mainly as atmosphere rather than commentary.
Context
The Sisters of Mercy built much of their catalogue on gothic, apocalyptic imagery and Cold War-era dread, and this track appears on Floodland, an album generally associated with the late 1980s rather than 1985, so the given release year should be treated with caution. Medleys combining otherwise separate songs were part of the band's live and recorded practice around this period, and the pairing of a religious mantra with Soviet imagery fits the era's wider cultural anxiety about nuclear standoff and ideological collapse.
Listen for
- the way the chorus phrase mutates slightly on each repetition rather than staying fixed
- the tonal break between the ceremonial first half and the more narrative, image-heavy second half
- how the same idea of dominion recurs in both religious and political vocabulary
- the shift from personal pronouns in the opening to collective, national address by the end
- the chant-like repetition in the final section functioning more as sound than statement
About The Sisters of Mercy
The Sisters of Mercy are an English rock band formed in Leeds in 1980. After achieving early underground fame, the band experienced a commercial breakthrough in the mid-1980s, sustaining their success until the early 1990s, when they halted the release of new records in protest against their record company, WEA.
1980 - present / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue