Moontan

Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music
This was the first GE album I came in contact with back then. And it was quite a shock, I must say.

Limited 29 CD box set. From their debut Just Ear-rings from 1965 till the tribute to their hometown The Hague from 2015 - all 26 studio albums by Holland's most legendary rock band are collected in a monumental box Complete Studio Recordings, augmented with no less than three CD's full of non-album tracks…

Best known in the U.S. for their hard rock material, Golden Earring have been the most popular homegrown band in the Netherlands since the mid-'60s, when they were primarily a pop group. The group was founded by guitarist/vocalist George Kooymans and bassist/vocalist Rinus Gerritsen, then schoolboys, in 1961; several years and personnel shifts later, they had their first Dutch hit, "Please Go," and in 1968 hit the top of the Dutch charts for the first of many times with "Dong-Dong-Di-Ki-Di-Gi-Dong," a song that broadened their European appeal. By 1969, the rest of the lineup had stabilized, with lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Barry Hay and drummer Cesar Zuiderwijk.

After pursuing a strict art rock style on To the Hilt, Golden Earring altered its style once more on the band's next album. Golden Earring replaced keyboardist Robert Jan Stips with guitarist Eelco Gelling and put aside its art rock pretensions for a hard rock sound dominated by the group's new twin-guitar attack. The result was Contraband, the band's strongest album since Moontan. It starts powerfully with "Bombay," an exuberant blast whose elaborate arrangement works in plenty of atmospheric country-styled shadings into an otherwise hard rock track. Other highlights include "Mad Love's Comin'," a dazzlingly atmospheric rumination on romance that transforms from a tense acoustic blues into a spacy mid-tempo rocker worthy of Pink Floyd…

Together represents an important step forward for Golden Earring. Unlike the group's previous outings, the songs on this album don't fall into strict rock or progressive categories. Instead, the group blurs these strict lines and weaves elements of each genre into a distinctive style that gives the songs their unique flavor. For instance, "Brother Wind" has the complex arrangement and length of a prog rock epic, but it moves forward with the energy and powerful riffing of a hard rock song. The group also makes a concerted effort to give each song a tight arrangement and usually more than one catchy hook. The result is the band's first truly consistent album.