It's December 21, so... welcome back to Prog-Rama! I’ve used this platform in the past to write my dicography review of The Flower Kings. These days, I use it mostly as my platform to publish my year-end top ten list. Let's face it: this is the only year-end tradition that really counts (I’ve been given to understand that something called “Christmas” happens sometime during my top ten, but I've never heard of it). This year is no different. But some things are…
Hello. My name is Gemma. I like writing about music, science and art. I’m a singer in a band called Tower of Kalla. I volunteer at a zoo. I have a podcast about dinosaurs in popular culture. I listen to progressive rock a lot.
2024 has been a year of transition, in more ways than one. At the start of the year, I came out as transgender. This has allowed me to live in a more authentic way, more in tune with myself. I have been blessed that my environment has been overwhelmingly (though not unanimously) accepting of this. I’ve mostly tried to get on with life as usual, facing the world as my true self. Nevertheless, it’s been a time of changes, highs and lows, great adventures, and a great deal of looking inward.
This is reflected in my year-end list, which provides a bit of counterbalance to the wildness of the year. My music of choice in 2024 has been, overall, fairly conservative. I’ve not sought out the most eclectic outer limits of my musical tastes, instead looking for things close to home, finding music that was comforting like a warm bath. 2024 was a good year for that. The prog releases this year were fairly uniformly of high quality, with no major outliers both on the upper and lower end. Of course, there have been some exceptions...
This meant that putting my ten favourites in order was not especially easy. The list could be in any number of orders, and any album in the top five would make a worthy number one. The differences have been small. Nevertheless, I’ve come up with an order to post these in.
A top ten means stuff will need to get left out, so here are some honourable mentions. These are nine albums that I enjoyed this year. Give it up for Pure Reason Revolution, Frost, David Gilmour, Opeth, Emerald City Council, Weather Systems, Dirt Poor Robins, K’mono and Trojka.
I could imagine each of these albums in the top ten, but the amount of quality albums has been high. I’m sure there’s been any amount of great albums this year I haven’t heard, and I always feel slightly bad for the hardworking musicians whose work I’ve missed. But that’s what life is. How many books do you have on your self that go unread? There’s always more to discover, and that can be a comforting thought, too. Who knows? Maybe I’ve got something on my list that you’ve missed.
So join me as we count down to the new year with our annual top ten advent calendar. Tomorrow, we’re getting started with number ten. At New Year’s Eve, I will reveal my number one.
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