About Everything Spins

I love music, and I love talking about music. I've been writing about music for quite a while now, in various past blogs, review sites and even in forums (remember those?). I do however also think that our own experiences with music are an integral part of what makes it special to us - that the personal angle is a very real thing and that there's little point in trying to ignore it. One of my limitations as a music fan is the inability to really describe my feelings when I'm presented with something new to me, and it's the reason why the traditional blog format of tackling everything new and shiny has always been something I've struggled with. For a long time I've also wanted a personal review library of sorts that reflects what I'm about when it comes to music and as a way to compile my thoughts on my personal collection. And thus, I created Everything Spins.

More specifically, this variant of Everything Spins. Others have existed in different blog formats over the years but mind has always yearned back towards the small community of music review sites and webrings of the early-mid 2000s - amateur writers going through their collections, exploring discographies as a whole rather than focusing on one release at a time, talking about music they knew well and not just the latest releases. A retro-style website has been in my head for years and eventually the urge became too much to resist. So, here you go. This is what you have now.

This is a site about music that's been loved (or sometimes not) and listened to for a while. My intention is to go through my ever-growing music collection artist by artist and album by album, reviewing and writing about these albums as viewed through my particular lenses. These writing are all entirely subjective and should be treated as such, and I have no pretensions that anything here is objective. I try to, obviously, to describe each release in a way that gives a good idea of the artist and the release in question even to those who aren't acquainted with them already - understanding the context behind each release is important to truly understand the releases themselves, in my point of view.

I would be amiss not to mention that the layout of this site has been heavily inspired by George Starostin's legendary Only Solitaire review site which embedded the idea of writing music reviews in my head all those lifetimes ago. It's difficult to improve or change the simple efficiency of how he handled his page and so there's been a lot of both subsconscious and conscious influence, and so this little blurb acts as both a credit and a thank you.

About the writer

Hello!

You can call me Flint - that's not my real name but it's one that I tend to go by among friends and the internet folks. I'm of Finnish origin, but I've been based in the UK for quite a while now. I'm of the perfectly correct opinion that music is best served physical and that CDs have remained the peak format since their inception. Dang near everything that's going to be catalogued on this site is a CD on my shelf, apart from the occasional digital-only releases.

You can also view my collection (and the full set of reviews) on Rate Your Music as well as Discogs, and you can spy on what I'm listening to right now on Last.FM. If you're interested in what else goes on in my life, from a social media perspective you can find me these days on BlueSky (RIP CoHost).

I also run the Manic Street Preachers Song-by-Song blog, which offers indepth opinions on every single track released by the Welsh band.

About the review schedule

OK, this section is strictly for the big nerds. But suppose you wanted to know more about how I determine what I review on this site and what the general schedule of things looks like. And suppose the writer simply wanted to indulge himself by typing it all down because over the course of this site's lifetime he's spent an awful long amount of time to come up with a system that is both efficient in helping my "clear" my collection as well as interesting enough to keep things varied for me. This section is literally just for my own fun so I can put all this down in writing somewhere, I'm under no delusion to think anyone gives a crap.

First things first, the basics. One, I only review what I own - this is about my collection and not just general music reviews. Two, there's no real schedule, I just write when I get some sparetime and once I feel like I've been revisiting an album long enough that I've got something concrete to say about it. I aim for once a week but that can slip because of life or because of whatever I'm reviewing.

But you know you're reading this section because you're eager to go deeper, so let's talk about The Rota. The Rota is how I queue up my releases. It exists as a very neat and colour-coded spreadsheet with loads of tables, updated every time I post something here. The rota is split into several categories which appear in different orders, queueing me with things to review from various different artists and angles in a manner that prevents from wearing myself out on binging on one single artist for an extended period of time, while also giving me a concrete goal to always aim for so I'm not left wondering what to write about next.

There are two "main" categories of the rota:

• Big discographies: These are artists who have - well - big discographies. This can be a mixture of primary discographies and side projects, but the general point is that there's quite a lot of ground to cover. This is the primary category right now which all the other categories below alternate with, so that every other slot is a Big Discog entry - and usually one "slot" is also 2-3 releases which I'll review in order before taking a "break" by going down the rota. This basically prevents me getting "stuck" in an artist for a massive amount of time, as the more frequent appearances push me to tackle these bigger back catalogues more frequently. Given the size of these projects, when it comes time to move to another artist I typically opt for something completely different from who I featured last; given my tastes, practically speaking it's between indie rock artists and everything else.
• Small discographies: The "secondary" category, which alternates every other rotation with all the rest of the categories listed below. Like the title says, this is reserved for smaller discographies so I still get to review some of these while focusing on artists with larger catalogues in the first instance. I also try to alternate between Finnish artists and everything else, just so I get the chance to talk more about all these groups from my native country that are otherwise often left undiscussed in the wider internet.

We then have everything else: rota slots dedicated to random one-offs and side projects, which alternate with the Small Discog slots in the schedule.

• 1) Gap fills: Catch-up reviews for new albums released by artists whose discographies I've reviewed through in the past. My rule of thumb is that I should have owned an album for at least a year until I review it, so this will never be a site that features reviews on the latest releases. And given the meager pace that these gap fills appear, the gap can grow past those 12 months. Which is good - means I can spend more time with the albums to have a more solid understanding of them.
• 2) One-offs: Not every album I own is part of some greater whole: they can be random individual albums I've gotten attached to from artists I otherwise don't care for, soundtracks, V/A compilations etc, and they tend to go on the "Miscellaneous" sections of the site. I have a vague system of deciding what comes next here but a lot of it's based on simply what random album I fancy reviewing at that point in time.
• 3) Sonic the Hedgehog soundtracks: This site has a dedicated section to Sonic soundtracks because I'm a big fan and a collector, but given how different it is to review soundtracks compared to "normal" albums (and especially with the size of some of these things!), I could imagine myself getting burned out if I were to treat these as a "big discog" "artist". So, they get their own section so that once in a while I can dive deep into the world of the Blue Blur specifically. I will eventually probably run out of these, and after that this category might get repurposed to something else. We'll see.

Therefore in practice the "schedule" of this site goes a little something like this: Big Discog x2, Small Discog, Big Discog x 2, one of the other three categories, Big Discog x2, Small Discog, etc etc. This means that there's constantly a sense of variety with my reviews here, while also keeping a focus so these pages get nicely filled.

Too much information? Possibly, and none of this will affect how this site reads. But in case you ever were curious how I operate this place and wonder when I get around to XYZ... there you go, I guess?

(Drawings by Kaoru Greendrake)