Gemma's Top Ten Albums of 2025: Honourable Mentions
My name is Gemma, and this is what I do.
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Foto Rene Secreve |
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Foto Rene Secreve |
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Foto Rene Secreve |
Currently, my own musical endeavours mostly concern covering the prog rock classics of the 70s and 80s. As a singer, I always try to bring some exuberance and flamboyance to the table. Prog rock is big, showy music, after all.
My fiancée is a classical musician, and increasingly I'm beginning to see myself as someone who does something similar. The same way a chamber choir or a symphony orchestra would bring the compositions of baroque musicians or classical auteurs to the stage, bring it back to life, keep this older music circulating in live settings for people to enjoy and experience live in the room, so too does a rock covers band keep the music of past composers alive and circulating on the stages of the world. Someone has to.
Consider Genesis. When those boys from Charterhouse started out, they never intended to be a live band at all. They considered themselves a collective of composers, writing songs perhaps for other people to perform. Destiny had other plans and Genesis ended up legendary rock stars, but now that they are older and (maybe?) retired we can begin to view them as the composers they always intended to be. We treat their body of work the same way a philarmonic orchestra might treat the symphonies of Beethoven.
How do we play these songs? What do the sounds and words mean to us, in the modern day? How do we keep old music sounding fresh and exciting? What do you put on a live setlist, and what do you leave off? Why is that keyboard solo in Firth of Fifth so damn difficult? How can a musician mediate between the audience and some tricky music?
And can we turn it into more than just a nostalgia trip?
I understand the need for nostaligia in a sary world. I also understand the desire to see and hear older music performed - I don't know if you've seen the pop charts lately, but it's a wasteland! The slow burning death of rock music has been foreseen for ages, the sudden onset death of pop music took even me by surprise. No wonder nostaliga is booming. What else is there? But I also see our nostalgia being used against us. Our warmest memories reheated, repackaged and sold back to us, for profit, and for our sedation.
As a rock covers singer, am I complicit in this? I see the problems with nostalgia, but I am not immune. Is it better to retreat into the past, endlessly looping our familiar tunes, spiraling out of the present day while all that we hold dear is grinded down and regurgitated by the slop machine?
Maybe that's why I am more excited than ever to present to you my Top Ten Albums of the year. As always, we will count down to the new year and share my number one on new years' eve.
For all that I celebrate the music of days gone by, I still get very excited about new releases every year, and I even get a little indignant when people tell me "they don't make music like they used to". Pardon me? They very much do! You just aren't listening!
Well, I did. I always try to to pay attention and listen to the newest releases, and here's what I found. Nothing could be more wothwhile than to celebrate those artists still standing, still believing that there is a place for new music, new progressive music, in the age of Slop.
After all, no one really wants to listen to music made by AI.
Here are some albums I liked this year that just about didn't make it to the actual top ten. That should tell you it's been another year full of strong releases. Give it up for: Magic Pie, The Flower Kings, Sleep Token, Flor de Loto, Nuova Era, Phase Transition, Dim Gray, Smalltape and Cardiacs.
Tomorrow I will share my number 10 favourite album of the year.
