This is part of a series, posting between 30th December 2025 and 3rd January 2026
Rival Consoles: Landscape from Memory (Erased Tapes)
Time waits for no man, and blogging waits for no, er, blogger. My 2025 albums list has been going on for days. Thanks for bearing with me. There’s just so much good music to bang on about.
Rival Consoles has made regular appearances in my best-of lists over the years. I wrote about him in 2018 (“so sweet and so warm”), in 2020 (“oh my heart”), in 2021 (“another corker”) and in 2022 (“ah, that Rival Consoles shimmer”). I’ve used the word ‘shimmer’ a lot.
He then hit a creative block. So effusive was my praise that Ryan Lee West got all embarrassed and couldn’t write another note of Rival Consoles music. Probably.
Thank goodness he found his mojo again. Let’s poke some of the tracks and see what sound they make. Catherine leads with an graceful melody that is scattered amongst shuffling half-step. Gaivotas side-chains itself into a gasping melancholia. Tape Loop sounds like Jon Hopkins on a tiny choo-choo train.
Yes, it’s intricate. That’s what Consoles does. But in redrawing his musical landscape, he has straked his cinematic vision with primary colours. Big bold melodies, perhaps more so than ever before.
Before we get too pretentious in our muso talk, it’s worth noting that:
(a) Some of the drum sounds were recorded using his sofa. and
(b) ‘Ryan Lee West’ is an anagram of ‘weeny alerts’.
So let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I like this reinvigorated Rival Consoles a lot. Although I’d better not tell him that: if he gets too embarrassed, there might not be another album for a decade.
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