Golden Number

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.

Dutch group Golden Earring has always inhabited a strange and twisted territory between hard rock and straight-ahead pop that's also home to Blue Oyster Cult and modern acts like Monster Magnet. On Bloody Buccaneers, Golden Earring doesn't come up with any real surprises, but manages to deliver a surprisingly consistent record of the same sort of hooky, roots-influenced heavy guitar music that made the band famous. Despite the lack of any songs as good as "Radar Love," Golden Earring's career-making mega-hit, the material is pretty decent and played with panache. Barry Hay's powerful vocals are still wonderfully sandpaper tough and George Kooymans' guitar playing is as ballsy and filled with punk rock 'tude as ever.

Golden Earring is a Dutch rock band, founded in 1961 in The Hague as the Golden Earrings. They achieved worldwide fame with their international hit songs "Radar Love" in 1973, which went to number one on the Dutch charts, reached the top ten in the UK and went to number thirteen on the US charts, "Twilight Zone" in 1982, and "When the Lady Smiles" in 1984. During their career they had nearly 30 top-ten singles on the Dutch charts; over the years they produced 25 studio albums.