(After a bit of a break our Vietnam-based writer Vizzah Harri returns to our miserable halls with reviews of six albums that struck some chords in his head, and may have damaged them.)

On the 9th of October ominous news surfaced that a group of hackers decided to lay siege to an internet institution that can generally be considered as a universal good. It was universally seen as a dick move. The Internet Archive is a library of audio, visual and textual resources as well as old website archiving with the mission of providing a library with omniversal access to all knowledge.

Flummoxed at the stupidity, because 99.9% of hackers love this site, and unable to use the Wayback Machine (it is back up now so this link is not compromised as of this writing), I simply had to take a hard stare at my ‘Catching Up’ list. October has been another stacked month for releases and November still has some serious offerings before the end-of-year bonanza. The list of what we weren’t able to get to is not always a question about quality or subjective – or even objective – partiality, it’s the sheer volume of content out there.

With the year almost over, I took it upon myself to go on the ‘way back machine of metal’ and jump back 282 days to January 26th. On its own an insane day for metal releases, two of the releases below fell on that same day. Continue reading »