��� 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...

���Number nine in the Hell Comes Home 7" series, the Dukatalon / Rites split delivers a bulldozing dose of slowmo violence from both bands. I don't remember any of Dukatalon's other stuff sounding quite this vicious; their "Mailine" is a goddamn skull-crusher, a ferocious co-mingling of swampy Louisiana-influenced sludge and barbaric thrash metal that's centered around punishing riffage. The song alternates between a massive neck-snapping Sabbathian blooze-groove and violently droning buzzsaw crust, which leads it to the lumbering doomcrush of the finale, as the Israeli band slowly ejects themselves into the outer atmosphere, blasting their black saurian sludge with a storm of spaced-out, echoing feedback. A killer song that makes me want to go dig up that album they did on Relapse and listen to it again right now.

��� First time hearing the Irish band Rites, but they acquit themselves nicely with their brand of barbarous metallic hardcore, which on "Barren" comes off somewhere in the vicinity of bands like Buzzoven and Cavity, meshing a brutal downtuned punk attack to surges of crushing desert rock chug and descents into sludgy slow-motion dirge. Goddamn heavy, and puts off enough aggressive energy that I bet these guys fucking kill when they perform live.