Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Making All The Right Noises means nothing if you cannot deliver upon your actions. You can create a sound that stimulates your own imagination, but if you dare not bring it to the people, then like the untethered thought, it will just fly off into the ether, disappearing quicker than a ripple of polite applause at a talent contest that nobody wanted to attend.

There can be no doubt of the impact that British group Thunder have had on their fans and the interested onlooker in their 30 plus year career, not only a mainstay of the rock genre, but a band that knew they could not stay apart, and that All The Right Noises would always appreciated and fully acted upon when they were in each other’s company.

Arguably there has never been a time when Thunder did not sound fresh, the pleasure of the music infecting joy into the mind of the listener, the live performances finding nothing but wide smiles and a pumped upbeat heart that formed glistening sweat on the crowd in front of them. That sense of continuality and musical expression continues unabated and persistently with care and attention in the band’s latest release, All The Right Noises.

For Ben Matthews, Chris Childs, Danny Bowes, Luke Morley and Harry James, the album is not just about sound, fury, and the beautiful progression of songs such as the opening salvo of Last One Out Turn Out The Lights, Destruction and the phenomenal The Smoking Gun, the truth behind the track Don’t Forget To Live Before You Die, St. George’s Day and the homely nod to Rock’s past in She’s A Millionairess, it is about keeping the genre honest in a time when it would be all too easy, as others have encountered, to allow standards to slip, to allow the sense of the comfortable to all-consuming.

In a period in which nothing can be taken for granted, to feel the heat and the giant spark to which Thunder have always provided, is to know of certainty, to appreciate absolutely that with all the right noises must come the unrelenting charge of constant passion; an emotion that Thunder will surely deliver to all who listen.

Ian D. Hall