Metal Music
Diminished Fifth Monday – Diabolus in Musica
A month with 5 Mondays is like a year with 13 moons or a man with 6 fingers upon his right hand…it means trouble. Well, not really, but I figured I’d use that as an excuse to talk my favorite “troubling” musical interval, the diminished fifth (AKA, Diabolus in Musica, Devil’s Tritone, Satan’s chord or…
Read MoreMid-Month Metal Masterpiece 1: Morbid Angel – Covenant
Here we are with yet another new www.isleyunruh.com feature! This time I will be discussing a different classic Thrash, Death, Black or just plain “Heavy” metal album on the 15th of each month. Of course, I’m an old school fellow, so don’t expect to see a lot of stuff post-1996 or so. Each installment will…
Read MoreInternet Meme Monday 2 – Inspired by Kittens
Welcome back to Internet Meme Monday! What is a meme you say? Well, as I understand it, a meme is similar to a gene, except instead of passing on genetic information it passes on cultural ideas. A meme can take many forms, from a catch phrase to a hand gesture, but the type of memes…
Read MoreThe Top Ten Most Ridiculous Black Metal Song Titles Ever!
What with the decision to cross over the storylines of Goth, Jock and Snob blogs, a simple thing as writing Goth Blog 3 has turned out to be more work than I planned on. So, while I know I’ve been writing more about underground metal than most people want to hear about lately, here is…
Read MoreThe Special Charm of Black Metal
Here is part two of my “why do I listen to the awful music I listen to” series. Part ONE covered Death and Thrash Metal, this time I look at the final genre in my “big three” of extreme metal, and my personal favorite, Black Metal. This is by no means an extensive history and…
Read MoreExtreme Metal Radio Edits 1: Slayer – Bedfull of Kittens
As a brief interlude before the second part of my “why do I listen to the horrible sounding music that I listen to” post (and because the lyric I made up for the earlier post intrigued me…and mostly because I already had the above picture) I thought I’d change a few minor words in one…
Read MoreThe Special Charm of Thrash and Death Metal
Underground metal is right up there with hardcore gangsta rap and the works of Montgomery Gentry in terms of cringe-worthy offensiveness. Underground/exteme metal is a broad term, I’ll specifically be looking at Thrash and Death Metal (Black Metal is a special case that will be dealt with in part two of this post), some of…
Read MoreThe Merit of Genre: The Brief Lives of Black Metal and Die Brücke.
Here it is the end of January and I haven’t posted anything all month. Since I try to get at least one post a month in, I decided to go ahead and cheat (instead of actually writing something new!) and post an essay from a research project I did a few summers ago. I tried…
Read MoreUnholy Black Metal and Hardcore Gangsta Rap…strange bedfellows?
Perhaps I should preface this discussion with the admission that I am by no means an expert in any genre relating to rap music. Yet every examination into the genre yields surprising similarities to my own favorite musical style: Unholy Black Metal. Metal/Rap experiments by Anthrax, Ice T, etc. not withstanding, on the surface the…
Read More