From The Vault: The Darkside - All That Noise (1990)

No matter how well you think you’re prepared, there are some things in life that you’re not ready for when they come knocking at your door. I wasn’t even ready for the blinding cover art of All That Noise, yet alone for the far flung hazy musical intoxication that shifted my life into hyperdrive, that jettisoned me beyond the third ring of Saturn and fogged my space mask with multi coloured crystalline dimensional mist … with each breath, causing me to feel that I was having one of those acid flashbacks I’ve been waiting for since the 1960’s.

The opening track “Guitar Voodoo” splintered my night, coming on strong, like a dose of The Doors mixed in with a bit of Jimi Hendrix, yet better, more profound, more enticing, laced with jangling guitar riffs, reverb, feedback, and overall, washed with a sonic heaviness that didn’t so much weigh me down, more that it set me free as the music built and ebbed, morphed and simmered … and pulled the carpet from under my feet, tossing me effortlessly around, as if I and the music had become one, as if all of the tripped out songs that strung my life together had gelled into one bit of emotional floating bliss.

All That Noise is not something you listen to, it’s something that you give yourself over to, and once having done that, you sense an elemental truth, that your partnership with the world as you knew it has shifted and profoundly changed, that all you thought you knew and held dear silently exploded across the irises of your eyes, and your ears are given over to a confluence of benevolent ostentatious extravagance from which you may surely return, but you will never be the same person again.

All That Noise is psychedelic music that overlays all that has gone before it with an essential passion for stopping time and replacing it with a prismatic aura of explorable fascination. Each song melts into the next with the excitement of defined joy and raptured bewilderment, yet in the same breath, moves with a crafted purpose.

Any why shouldn’t it … here Pete Bain [Bassman], who once played with Spacemen 3, along with Stuart Roswell [Rosco aka Sterling Roswell] and Nick Haydn found not only the formula, but the key to the box that holds the Holy Grail, collectively knowing that this moment in time is one that will never come again, and within that collective consciousness, have delivered an album that is equaled by none.

I for one consider this album deeply each time I pull it from the shelf, knowing that this is strong stuff, that it will totally consume me for the evening, that I had better decide on what album to follow it with before dropping the tone arm, as trying to follow it up without forethought, will be an impossible task.

While you can’t go wrong with this bit of wax, you certainly can make it all that much better by laying your hands on a copy of the picture disc, which for my money, has been pressed well enough to compete with the black vinyl.

– Jenell Kesler