I learned about a curious byproduct of Amsterdam’s liberal social policies from a tall man who gave me an excellent haircut (he was at least eight feet tall). After I told him a few of my favorite bands, he said, “foreign bands always play their worst shows in Amsterdam. They get extremely high, and they think they sound great, but the audience is always bored.”

This seemed like a particularly keen insight when I saw Stars play at Melkweg.1 The band was undeniably good, but not as life-changingly great as certain people2 had led me to expect. More to the point, however, both singers were cloyingly insistent that Amsterdam was their favorite city on Earth (“We, like… looooooove you… Amsterdam.”3), and while their roadies fixed a guitar problem the band resorted to quoting from the Simpsons Movie (“This song is dedicated to Homer Simpson.”4). Less affected was Dead Meadow, practitioners of the critically esteemed genre known as “stoner rock,” who played at Paradiso.5 Their strong, 70s-style licks carried a deep note of the raw side of Amsterdam, a sound only enriched by the band’s drug intake.

On a page in my Field Notes Brand6 notebook I made a schedule of shows I wanted to see. It’s filled with bands from North American indie labels, like the two above. Looking at the list, I felt a twinge of traveler’s guilt. I did not come half way across the world to see bands I could just as easily catch in Seattle. Compelled to musically assimilate, I looked through a free copy of a new Dutch newspaper for expat hipsters, Amsterdam Weekly.7

The pages of this libelous publication contain only lies and awkward sentence structures. Here’s what the Weekly had to say about the Quazatrons, a local band playing at an event hosted by a Dutch design academy: ‘The Quazatrons can be described as The Velvet Underground meets The Stone Roses meets George Orwell meets Joseph Heller.8” Now, this sounds red hot. I hope you will forgive me for paying 10 euros to see this band. They did not, sadly, live up to the quote. This, I feel, is a more representative description: “mud meets amplification.” The Quaztrons’ instruments oozed into a thick sludge as they passed through the speakers, and the underlying melodies were ruthlessly unremarkable. The best part of their show was that the lead singer looked like a young Isaac Brock, but, when you think about it, is that even a good thing?