Band:	House Of Atreus
Album:	From The Madness Of Ixion
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	October 2018

01. The Madness Of Ixion
02. Zealous Inequity
03. Oath Of The Horatii
04. Cordelia
05. Call To Thee, Concubines
06. Ad Hominem
07. Prometheus Bound
08. Bonded Behind Supremacy

If you want to like Arghoslent but are not yourself a horrible racist, House Of Atreus is the band you have been waiting for.

From The Madness Of Ixion offers a similar experience to the riff-worshipping, power-indebted melodeath that you could get from Incorrigible Bigotry on a musical level - but lyrically and conceptually, all that incorrigible bigotry has been classed up into Greek mythology, Shakespearean tragedy, and everybody's favorite Jacques-Louis David painting that doesn't involve Napoleon. More than likely it's about the actual oath of the Horatii and not the painting, but, hey, at least it isn't extolling the virtues of the slave trade.

House Of Atreus play a style of melodic death metal that is sadly underrepresented in the extreme arena, a mellifluous and malleable style based in older schools of heavy metal riffing that borrows freely from thrash, doom, and even black metal as the attitude of the song demands. House Of Atreus project not overwhelming heaviness but gruffness, more of a thrashy leanness that is willing to be abrasive in the service of musical ideas than a stated need to be destructive. It's almost as if the band is trying to engineer an independent brand of melodeath, shying away from the keyboards, polished production, and simpler song structures that many of the biggest melodic death metal bands have embraced and curtailing or transforming the harmonized guitar leads used here; instead, they stick to mid-range riffing and mid-range growls, with slightly noisy production and a rhythm section as dynamic and well-considered as the other half of the band.

Imagine Be'lakor, except they've taken a note from Artillery and crammed as many riffs as they could into every song and Ross The Boss wrote all the riffs. Deceased and Kvelertak also spring to mind as the coarse blend of death and other extreme genres meets its match in mighty melodies that would make any power metal band proud. This formula makes for snappy four-minute attention-grabbers like "Prometheus Bound" and just as easily sustains seven-to-eight-minute tracks like "Ad Hominem" and "Call To Thee, Concubines"; the possibilities are fairly limitless with the stock of riffs House Of Atreus has built up and the gravelly fury with which they're delivered.

The only thing that bugs me about this album is the name of the second track, "Zealous Inequity." I guess I can't be sure without lyrics in front of me, but I can't stop thinking that it should be "iniquity." If I'm wrong, though, I'm going to feel like an ass.