Regarding Some Songs

After the Rain

Wow.  Where do I start with After the Rain?  I love this song.  I love this song with a deep, abiding and probably unhealthy passion.

Every true child/fan of the 80s needs a little cheese in their lives, and with this song you're guaranteed a practically lethal dose of dairy, injected directly to the bloodstream.  And we're not talking gouda or edam or any of those uppity gourmet varieties here.  No.  We're talking good, honest, cheap-arse cheese: mozzarella or cheddar or maybe even some of that stuff that sprays out of a can.

Oh yes, the cheese is strong in this one.

And okay, for the pedants out there, strictly speaking, if you want to get hung up on stuff like 'details' and 'facts' and 'accuracy', this song did actually come out in 1990, but I think we can all agree that its heart and soul and fashion and hair lie firmly in the 80s.  And if we can't, well then, it's a good thing I'm writing this and you're not.

Speaking of hair, clearly we need to address that first.  In the heyday of hair metal, were there any manes finer than those of the Nelson twins?  There were certainly none straighter or blonder or more industrially conditioned.  Looking very much like some mad scientist's attempt to combine Jon Bon Jovi and a Barbie doll (twice), Matthew and Gunnar strutted their hirsute stuff out the front of their eponymous band like some wind machine's worst nightmare.

Only, you see, the irony is that the hair metal of which Nelson were first-class purveyors was of a very particular kind—the kind without the metal.  Quite frankly, these guys were about as metal as a tree, or Katy Perry.  Possibly less.  But that's okay—as previously mentioned, they had enough hair to cover for it.  I think that's why there were two of them.

In an interesting aside, I actually developed a profound appreciation for this song's epic degree of cheesiness years before I even saw the video.  And then I saw the video.

Whoa.  Just whoa.

Much like the song, the video is big.  It's dumb.  And yes, of course it's positively dripping in dairy-based saturated fats.  In short, it's magnificent.  Don't try to understand it, don't analyse it, don't even think too much about it—you'll only hurt yourself.  Just watch it.  It's bigness and dumbness and cheesiness simply transcend logic and sense.  

There are too many guitar-players to be truly feasible, there's more hair than you could shake a curling wand at, the fashion is eye-watering, the 'special' effects are gloriously of their time and the whole thing seemingly takes place in some kind of leather-clad, moussed-up, groupie-filled version of Neverland.  Magnificent.  Inexplicable, but magnificent.  Just try to ignore the shouty dad at the start.

And the song.  Ah, the song.  Put it on, crank it up and then air-guitar your way around the room, preferably in your socks—trust me, it's better that way.  It starts at 110% and somehow amps it up from there, for just under four minutes of guitar-driven, ridiculous, unashamedly trashy pop-rock of the very best kind.

Don't worry about the lyrics, they're just there as vocal instrumentation, basically a backing track for the drums and the guitars.  Have I mentioned the guitars?  If not, allow me to do so—guitars, guitars, guitars.

And guitars.

The song starts with guitars and it ends with guitars.  In fact, it doesn't even really end, but rather fades out as the guitar-section ascends through an increasingly bonkers series of key changes and solos, seemingly having missed the memo that the song was over.

Glorious.