Golden☆best マリーン

After spending much of the late '70s and the early '80s as a cult band, Golden Earring returned to an international level of popularity in 1982 with the hit single (and popular MTV attraction) "Twilight Zone." This song and seven others are featured on Cut, a solid album that found Golden Earring starting to deviate from the pop/rock formula they perfect on No Promises…No Debts and Prisoner of the Night. Like those albums, Cut works its way through a series of guitar-based rock songs built on strong hooks. However, the band allows themselves to instrumentally stretch out a bit on some of the songs this time out.

On To the Hilt, Golden Earring fully gives themselves over to the prog rock tendencies that they had toyed with throughout the 1970s. The resulting album has a strong prog feel but lacks the characteristic sound and the solid material that defined the group's best efforts to that point. The band puts in a typically energetic and thunderous performance, but their strong instrumental chops can't overcome the self-indulgent nature of much of the album's material: "Why Me?" and "Latin Lightning" are a few of the potentially interesting songs on To the Hilt that are undercut by dull, overlong sections of jamming. Said songs also lack the tight arrangements and the sudden, surprising instrumental twists that made the group's past epics so interesting.

Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and musician Molly Tuttle and her band, Golden Highway, release their new album, City of Gold, following Tuttle’s acclaimed 2022 record, Crooked Tree, which won Best Bluegrass Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards and led NPR Music to call her, ‘a female flat picker extraordinaire with agility, speed and elegance who distinctively brings American roots music into the spotlight’, adding that the album ‘marries the improvisatory solos of traditional bluegrass with singer-songwriter sophistication.’