�� 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...

//It's a goddamn shame that Black Sun had to hang it up not long after their installment in this series came out; the Scottish band's brand of Swans-influenced sludge had been a big fave around here, especially with their 2010 album Twilight Of The Gods. Aside from a collaboration with Theologian that had come out the same year as a limited edition cassette, this is the final word from these masters of bleak, tortured heaviness. The crushing evil sludge of their "Crawling Like A Leech" continues to mix their scenes of sexual degradation and abject nihilism with a churning industrial-tinged undercurrent seething beneath the surface, echoes of Filth-era Swans in the churning bottom-heavy riffage and haunting melodies, those layered guitars forming into something grimly beautiful as the song tromps endlessly into the void, a militaristic lust-driven death march into oblivion. On the other side, we get those Finnish noise rock thugs Throat sluggin' us with another blast of their Am Rep-on-steroids clank and crush, via the howling discordant violence of "Anal Paranoid", welding their trademark noisy hysteria to a massive earthshaking sludge riff amid all kinds of clanging harmonics. Total crushing ugliness.