Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 7hShirley Collins sings as though the songs have simply been left in her care. Dolly builds a small Tudor orchestra around them without disturbing the dust. The 20th century waits politely outside. 030
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 8hRecorded in a Chicago church for people with more pressing concerns than jazz. Cannonball meets them with equal parts sermon, soul revue and hard bop. Sometimes the handclaps get there first. 050
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Dameron treats a small jazz group like a pocket-sized orchestra. Melodies curl through arrangements that seem to have considered every possibility. The pleasure is in watching everything fit. 040
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Two young men making pop as though the English weather might overhear them. Strings, harmonies and little baroque flourishes soften every edge. The clouds never quite decide to rain. 020
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 06/09/2026Six standards, two instruments and remarkably little agreement about who is accompanying whom. Evans and Hall keep swapping foreground and background. Nobody gets the last word for long. 050
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 06/09/2026A rockabilly survivor discovers the ’60s have left the door open. A decade’s worth of new ideas have accumulated on the other side. Hawkins helps himself. 010
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 05/09/2026The Stones find their natural habitat somewhere between a church, a bar and a basement. Jagger occasionally surfaces; Richards seems perfectly happy underneath. The dirt is structural. 010
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 05/09/2026Gospel voices dressed in Atlantic soul. Country and R&B drift through the arrangements. Nobody has to hurt alone. 020
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 29/08/2026650 albums listened to, ranked and filed on the way to the Top 1000 albums of 1970. Keir Dullea’s singing makes HAL sound positively soulful. Some eliminations are easier than others, sorry Keir. 000
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 21/08/2026Sweet soul stretched over the bones of James Brown’s funk. Sweet Charles finds warmth, space and vulnerability in the groove. Even “Strangers In The Night” learns how to move. 140
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 18/08/2026By 1973 Arbete & Fritid had discovered that folk and the avant-garde had plenty to discuss. Fiddles, drones and improvisation carry on the conversation. Far. 060
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 16/08/2026A New York folk singer handed a major-label budget and apparently very little supervision. Like Oar after a good night’s sleep and some encouraging news. The happy sound of nobody interfering. 050
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 15/08/2026After ten years in the business, the Isleys finally became their own bosses. The music immediately gets tougher, looser and considerably more confident. Funny what owning the masters can do. 020
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 15/08/2026Abdul-Malik was looking beyond Hard Bop while others were still polishing it. African rhythms and Abdul-Malik’s great woody bass do the travelling. No fusion. Just curiosity. 060
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 15/08/2026Geesin supplies the mischief, Waters the melancholy. Songs rub against tape collage, heartbeat and bodily noise. Even the plumbing gets a writing credit. 020
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 10/08/2026Favourite films the 1960s: 1960 L’Avventura 1961 Accattone 1962 Harakiri 1963 An Actor’s Revenge 1964 A Hard Day’s Night 1965 Pierrot le Fou 1966 The Battle of Algiers 1967 PlayTime 1968 Dragon’s Return 1969 The Colour of Pomegranates 171
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 07/08/2026Still wearing its blues-rock clothes, but Kevin Coyne’s singular vision is already impossible to mistake. You can already hear him wriggling out of the box. 020
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 04/08/2026Proof that David Axelrod could turn absolutely anything into deep, cinematic soul. Even Handel. 030
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 22/07/2026I’m always happy to find Miles on Blue Note. He was already finding space where nobody else looked. A young man’s record. 050
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 19/07/2026A funk record built like a siege. Nobody understood endurance better than Fela. Every repetition narrows the escape rout 000
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 19/07/2026Swamp soul with a jazz musician’s patience. The title is the only thing here that overplays its hand. The real ceremony is in the rhythm section. 040
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 19/07/2026Yep. Tim Hardin’s introspection and the Left Banke’s baroque melancholy youtu.be/f6ZDcMa_c_4?...youtu.beKenny Rankin - Come Away MelindaYouTube video by Keir Hardie 040
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 19/07/2026Somewhere between Tim Hardin’s introspection and the Left Banke’s baroque melancholy. The covers nod to convention; the originals quietly ignore it. 010
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 09/07/2026Country, gospel and hard bop sharing the same front porch. Pearson never plays up the novelty. The seams never show. 060
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 08/07/2026The dancefloor is only half the story. Underneath the immaculate songwriting there is flex. No chasing. The groove’s already his. 060
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 08/07/2026Karen Dalton’s ache, Evie Sands’ soul. Karen Beth—less haunted than one, less forceful than the other. Earthy, melodic and quietly devotional. 180
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 05/07/2026Neymar showing up here is like Syd Barrett walking into the studio during the Shine On You Crazy Diamond sessions. 0123
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 05/07/2026Somewhere between Bitches Brew and the California coast, but with far more light getting in. Latin pulse and spiritual jazz drift in and out of focus. Too warm for the purists, too loose for the virtuosos. 050
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 05/07/2026Horace Andy becomes another texture in the landscape, shaped in the echo chambers of King Tubby’s studio. The hand-pulled silk-screen sleeve—limited to around 300 copies—is almost as remarkable as the record. 050
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 28/06/2026The hits largely belonged to someone else. The voices, arrangements and sheer joy belong entirely to The Monitors A reminder that Motown’s second string was better than most people’s first. 000
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 21/06/2026The greatest British sitcom never made it to television. A celebration of a country’s fading certainties and a critique of the myths built around them. Ray Davies keeps the sentiment honest by never entirely trusting it. 050
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 21/06/2026Forty tracks. Forty years. One song per year. Episode 5 of 40 Years of Schoolin’ moves from 1950 to 1989 as usual. A drum lesson. An Argentinian guitarist. A French chanteuse. A jug band captured at home. Arthur Russell taking disco apart. A self-released Quebec cassette. 210
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 07/06/2026I just hit 500 albums ranked. Still have 3000 albums released that year to get through to get a top 1000 though. 020
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 30/05/2026This is like watching the technically brilliant but dull and ineffective Spain team circ 2018. Side to side, faint to shoot-check, no actual striker 000
Reposted by Ben CornishLee @76kid.bsky.social · 26/05/2026#nowplaying An early 50th birthday present from @pasty90.bsky.social - thanks again mate. 051
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 26/05/2026From cool jazz modernism to deep avant-soul to a late-period Stones cameo that steals the entire atmosphere of the song. Sonny Rollins could sound precise, searching, warm or completely untethered — sometimes within the same solo. 110
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 23/05/2026This Santa Maria 1st pressing sounds huge. Underneath the chaos and guitar smear there’s still deep soul music happening — bruised, cosmic and oddly tender. 140
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 23/05/2026Critics called it a misfire. They were probably right. But there’s something compelling about hearing Motown lose its balance in real time. A beautiful, expensive confusion of soul, psychedelia and executive panic. 170
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 15/05/2026Sweet 1st press pick-up in Copenhagen. Cadet-era soul at its richest and most emotionally exact. Half the singers of the next decade are hiding somewhere inside this record. 090
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 15/05/2026Halfway between the pub and the picket line. The voice stays steady while the landscape industrialises around it. One of those records that sounds older and more modern every year. 050
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 10/05/2026Rice performing the Heimlich Maneuver to keep Mavropanos alive while the ball was mid flight. Gentlemen. 131
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 09/05/2026Middling albums with utter masterpieces for opening tracks. Those first two tracks suggest a lost classic. The remainder plays like seasoned professionals trying to maintain a mood they’d already perfected twenty minutes earlier. 010
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 09/05/2026Not many records can slip so naturally between Glen Campbell, Gene Clark and Bob Lind. Grey in palette only — warm in temperature, bruised at the edges, and quietly devastating. 030
Ben Cornish @pasty90.bsky.social · 09/05/2026Loose enough to breathe, tight enough to swing. British folk-blues rarely sounded this natural. 030
