Today, my dad gave me over a hundred vinyl records from his personal collection that for various reasons he felt like I should have.

Some of them he already had another version of and gave me the obsolete one, some he decided to instead buy as a CD, and some others he simply wanted me to own and listen to them.

Of course, I am way excited for these! After all, my dad has a very broad and diverse taste in music, and generally everything he recommends I can at the very least understand why people would like it. I also commonly enjoy listening to vinyl over digital music for a variety of reasons: they force you to listen without skipping tracks and therefore lead to exposure to more diverse music, and putting them on is somewhat of a ritual, encouraging you to listen to them actively and willingly instead of having them play in the background.

Additionally, they're pretty to look at both in their shelved form when they're spinning; and by listening to entire albums over shuffled streaming playlists, you might get much more of an idea about artists and their journey as musicians, enjoy concept albums and get a sense of a band rather than a broad genre.

However, I still feel like I would not do this collection justice if I simply listened to them out of context. I would listen to them, perhaps find one or two new favorites, but largely forget about them again once the dust has settled.

So what I decided to do is this: In the coming days, I will create a new VINYL shrine in the shrines section. Regularly, I will take one album out of my collection, listen to it, find background information, and write down my impressions and opinions on it in a blog article that I publish as part of the shrine. I hope these will bring joy to people who want to discover new music, want to hear someone's untainted first impressions on their favorite records, and not least of all my dad, who will surely enjoy reading about what I think about his music recommendations.

Edit: The shrine has been created, click here to go there!