Well, here was a fun e-mail to get from the reader known as Strapping Young Lad:

I grew up on Long Island on a horse breeding farm called Fast Break Farms. We’re pretty small; we usually only have enough room for about 10 horses. My parents were looking for a name for their new racing horse, and I suggested Cloudkicker. My parents loved it, and thought it was cute (?!). We’ve also had one horse named In Flames (who, much like the band, started off promising but sucks now) and another named Shagrath (Shaggy for short). I’m trying to get my parents to name all of our new horses after metal bands… I think it would be pretty sweet!”

We agree! So we asked SYL to send us some pics of the horses in question, and, yay for us, he obliged!

Cloudkicker

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Decibel is cooler than we are, which is why we’ve kidnapped their kitties and told them we’ll drown the fuckers if they don’t write a weekly column for us. Lucky for all cats involved, they agreed to the terms. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli.

It actually took some doing this time around, but congratulations to commenter du jour “Mat” for correctly guessing our November Hall of Fame, Angel Witch’s self-titled 1980 nut-crusher. As aforementioned, he scores a free six-month subscription to Decibel, not to mention — should he deign to drop me a line — a Rapegoat sticker and maybe some additional ludicrous extreme ephemera.

The Angel Witch HOF isn’t even the big highlight in our November issue, as you can see from the image above. I mean, we’ve all seen the new video by now, and thumbs up to Mordecai 9000 for the Han Solo dig in the comments, but this get-up’s a little more Queen of Naboo IMHO. And while Shagrath at no point in our cover story mutters, “So, this is how liberty dies — to thunderous applause,” maybe he explains the sikk new threads a little. You’ll have to see for yourself.

Of course, if you’re in the Dimmu-sucks-and-we’re-homos-for-putting-them-on-the-cover camp, you can always feast on a creepy Michael Gira interview, Kylesa backlash in the reviews, Q&A heaven with Dave Wyndorf, a Pig Destroyer studio report, and a Red Chord tour report, featuring Guy Kozowyk’s delightful memories about this very site! Now bow your heads in respect for the Mets’ recent tragic number acquisition and give us your money so we can sell you some fucking cars and shit.

-AB

If you don’t buy yourself a copy of the November 2010 issue of Decibel or, better yet, buy yourself a full subscription, Andrew Bonazelli will send the dude who played Jar Jar Binks to your house to annoy you ’til you wanna kill yourself.

So last week Snowy Shaw officially joined and then officially quit Dimmu Borgir, all within twenty-four hours. And now Shagrath says the band is going to remain a three-piece consisting of the “core” members of himself and guitarists Sneezy and Grumpy — uh, I mean, Silenoz and Galder — with some touring members so the band doesn’t just become the equivalent of a black metal karaoke band. That’s not the first time a band has made the decision to never hire a permanent replacement — metal and non-metal bands from The Rolling Stones to R.E.M. to Korn have all done it, presumably because a) they don’t think anyone else has anything to bring to the table creatively and b) it’s cheaper. It will be the first time I’ve ever heard of a co-lead vocalist being just a hired gun, though, so that will probably be kinda weird.

So while we wait to see which poor bastards are the new not-really members of Dimmu Borgir, we can listen to a new song, “Gateways,” with vocals by Snowy Shaw, and dream of what could have been — namely, a world in which there was a band features members named both “Silenoz” and “Snowy.”

At least, I assume that’s Snowy doing the clean vocals. Whomever that is at the 1:32 mark, he or she should be shot in the throat. Holy shit, that is the ugliest sound I have ever heard not coming from an overweight octogenarian. It’s like they hired an eunuch, and then made that eunuch inhale helium before singing. I imagine that what’s a cockroach sounds like when it sings. Luckily, some chick comes in at the end and doesn’t sound like a member of the cast of Joe’s Apartment.

Check out the song here.

-AR

Holy shit, this is hilarious.

Last month rumors started to circulate that Snowy Shaw was the new bass player and clean vocalist for Dimmu Borgir. I mean, really, they were barely rumors. Everyone knew it was true. Therion, Shaw’s previous band, even basically said as much in a press release.

Then, yesterday, Dimmu Borgir finally confirmed the so-called “rumor,” and even released photos of Snowy in his Dimmu Borgetup:

Call me cynical, but I assume that announcement was made now, a month after we all already knew what the deal was, to help promote Dimmu’s new single, “Gateways,” which went on sale via various digital retailers yesterday (it is not, as of this writing, streaming anywhere that I know of). I still haven’t heard the song, but I assume that it sounds an awful lot like Dimmu Borgir, only with Snowy Shaw singing instead of ICS Vortex.

Problem is, I just read that Snowy has now quit Dimmu and returned to Therion.

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In his review of The Underworld Regime, the debut album of “black metal dream team” Ov Hell, our own Sammy O’Hagar wrote the following:

With a group of dudes as impressive as this, all the great things about black metal are all but guaranteed to show up. And they do: the riffs are wall-to-wall excellent, Shagrath’s vocals — even despite the fact that I’m not particularly fond of Dimmu Borgir — are solid, and I’ll be damned if there’s a better drummer in black metal than Frost that’s not named Trym or Hellhammer (and even then, it’s a three-way tie). Ice Dale and Teloch even manage to throw in a spidery arpeggio every now and again to keep things from devolving into a haze of tremolo-picked minor chords. Yes, it’s cheesy, but like good power metal, it fully and unironically embraces it, transforming what most would make a groan-worthy affair into chest-beating awesomeness.

That sounds like something you’d wanna listen to, right? Well, now you can! Even though Prosthetic won’t release the album until April 13, our PLPs (that’s “platonic life partners”) at Metal Injection are streaming The Underworld Regime right now. Ov Hell features members of Dimmu Borgir, Gorgoroth, 1349, Enslaved, and Satyricon, so you just know it’ll be ebil. Listen now.

-AR

I suppose I distrust supergroups because it’s too easy. Throw a bunch of dudes in bands people like together and it should instantly equal something people like/something people will throw money down to hear. And while there are exceptions (Them Crooked Vultures, Shrinebuilder, Cream) to the eating-up-downtime/cash grab rule, it’s more often than not the standard (see: Damn Yankees, Chickenfoot, a library’s worth of other names). But occasionally bands fall right in the middle, where they’re not in it for breaking new ground but also aren’t in it to exploit listeners to get a new yacht (or a first yacht). And along with that comes a sense of nothing-to-lose, in that the bandmembers will have their more-successful day jobs when the project ends, so why not have a good time in the meanwhile? And this is the case for black metal dream team Ov Hell, which includes members of some of the most important bands in Norway. Jagged yet refined and mean but kind of fun, Ov Hell manage to sound pretty decent on their debut, The Underworld Regime. Not quite a classic but certainly more than a distraction, Ov Hell are some of black metal’s most essential dudes flexing their frostbitten muscle, and that’s certainly never a bad thing to hear.

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So in case ya didn’t hear, Dimmu Borgir fired their bassist/clean vocalist, ICS Vortex, and their keyboard player, Mustis, over the weekend. Well, I guess technically the band “parted ways” with those members, but by all accounts, it wasn’t a break-up reached by mutual decision.

To wit: Mustis briefly changed his MySpace status to “betrayed” before revealing this little nugget of information:

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