irregardlessly To me, this album is the embodiment of symphonic power metal. Part 1 of The House of Atreus is Virgin Steele at their most complex, pompous, and melodramatic. The album consists of VS's bombastic melodic songs, separated by more classical instrumental type segue breaks. The album is a concept album about some ancient greek myth type stuff.

The songs are all mostly pretty great. Highlights for me include the galloping opener Kingdom of the Fearless, Return of the King/Flames of the Black Star, and the great closing suite of Garden of Lamentation / Agony and Shame (who's theme is a callback to a theme on Invictus) / Gate of Kings / Via Sacra. In between these opuses you have standard VS rocking goodness like Great Sword of Flame and Through the Ring of Fire.

The short musical segues are of varying quality. I find them to be mostly of decent quality, and feel that they add to the album as a whole, cohesive work. However, sometimes they fall a bit flat. Blaze of Victory for example is 4 minutes of mostly spoken word storytelling over music. It's not terrible but usually a skipper for me.

If you love your metal melodramatic, bombastic, powerful, and melodic, you will love this album. The real songs are great, but the segues can detract a little so I docked this a star and called it a 4.