Customer Reviews

Hello Amsterdam

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When a friend gave me this ep as a gift in 1997, I wasn't too impressed. American Music Club? The name was reminiscent of ill-fated relationships with record clubs (12 albums for $1!)or the moive theater my husband worked at while in college. After laying dormant in my CD collection for years, I decided to give AMC another try and I was blown away. The ep kicks off with "Hello Amsterdam" and just gets better. My favorite song is "Just Took My Sleeping Pills...", a rocking, sad song about losing oneself and the disappointments inherent in relationships. Really wonderful album overall. I look forward to discovering more AMC--wonderful!

The most interesting things about this EP is that it showcases some startlingly different sides of American Music Club. Their full-length albums are masterpieces of cohesiveness, but this one spreads the band all over the stylistic map in a way that can't help but shake the listener up a little bit.

The version of "Hello Amsterdam," though ostensibly different from the one included on "San Francisco," sounds about the same to me: raucous, straightforward rock, and a tribute to ABBA, no less. Then you have the nervous energy of "I Just Took My Two Sleeping Pills," followed by the comic and cynical bitter of "The President's Test" (supposedly written about a guitar-shop encounter between Mark Eitzel and members of the power-ballad band, Tesla). Then you've got a beautiful cover of the old pop classic, "On a Clear Day," a move that might have prefigured Mark's inclusion, on his solo "60 Watt Silver Lining," of the "Dusty in Memphis" arrangement of another pop standard, "No Easy Way Down." The EP's final two tracks are a more passionate rendering of "San Francisco"'s "The Thorn In My Side," and then a real AMC rarity, a non-Eitzel song, in "Elbow Deep."

All in all, this EP's cheap and has some really good songs on it. Probably not the best introduction to AMC (any of their albums would work better in that capacity, I think), but if you're already a fan, you can't help but like "Hello Amsterdam" for its stark contrast to the tonal consistency of most of the group's albums; this one's really all over the place.