�� Beginning in 2012, Irish label Hell Comes Home began to unleash a subscription club series of 7"s that featured pairings of some of the best bands in the noise-rock/sludge/doom underground (and beyond); featuring the likes of Thou, Fistula, Burning Love, Dead Elephants, and Coffinworm, this series delivered all-new material from the artists involved, each 7" featuring one song from each band along with a digital download code for the music. In addition, each 7" is presented in a cream-colored jacket with striking original artwork from Polish designer Kuba Sok�lski, who illustrated each of these singles with a different mutant insect-like monstrosity, rendered in the sort of detail that you would expect from an entomological text. The look and feel of these records got my collector's vein pulsating in a big way, and we've managed to snag a selection of these 7"s for the C-Blast shop; numbers are limited, of course, and several of the entries in the Hell Comes Home series are already out of print...

��This installment in the series pairs up proggy Aussie crushers Akaname with Seattle psych ensemble Fungal Abyss, an offshoot of heavy prog-sludge outfit Lesbian. Akaname delivers some killer sprawling sludge with their "Rain Will Be The New Gold", the drummer's intricate, off-time rhythms and complex arrangements underscoring the band's interesting mix of black metal-influenced riffing, trippy synthesizer drift and spastic metallic chug. At times resembling a more blackened version of Mastodon or Keelhaul, this is menacing and mathy stuff that slips into some seriously devastating metallic crush later in the track. I loved the prog-tinged fury of Akaname's track, one of the coolest discoveries I've made through this series of 7"s.

�� The other side feature's Lesbian's psychedelic improv alter-ego Fungal Abyss emitting a cloud of dark, instrumental heaviness called "Humongous Fungus", purportedly recorded under the influence of hallucinatory mushrooms; it's a lot better than you'd expect from the goofy title, a slow building jam that forms from layers of meandering guitar over the heavy, droning groove of the rhythm section, evolving from a dreamy haze of almost shoegazy rock into something akin to Isis at their prettiest, building into an almost space rock finale that winds down into an effects-smeared haze at the end.