Las Vegas is an endlessly interesting place that I’m very eager to leave. For reasons not entirely clear to me, I’m here for a conference on something called Sitecore, although three days have gone by and I remain pretty in the dark on what that is. Not literally, of course - I’m not sure that there’s a square inch of this city that isn’t neon-lit around the clock.

I've spent almost my entire life on the internet - playing online chess and flash games as a child, whiling away social and geographical isolation in my adolescence, and reading articles at a succession of bizarre computer-focused nothing-jobs after college. The anthropology thereof is the only academic field in which I am truly interested, and to which I can't shake the urge to start contributing.

I was jazzed about this for the entire two days between me finding out about it and it being released, but alas it's pretty weak. This was probably always going to be an issue for Smith, whose breakthrough Ears was most notable for sounding completely unique. There's still some good stuff on here, but for the most part she doubles down on a particular subset of the Ears sound and makes an entire album out of rehashing those more pop-leaning efforts.

I can't front like this isn't as cheesy as the cover suggests, but it remains well worth your time. This may be the single best document of the mid-80s Minneapolis scene, combining the efforts of the city's two best songwriters (Jam & Lewis and Monte Moir) with a killer-to-filler ratio about as high as you can hope for from any release of the era. There's not a ton to say about it; I really like slow jams and Alexander O'Neal is among the most technically proficient vocalists ever.

There are actually two points that I want to make here, both revolving around Atrocity Exhibition. Rather than breaking them out into distinct, formalized pieces, I’ve combined them for a couple reasons: primarily that this style of writing is atrociously exposition-heavy and it would be pretty boring to re-tread the contextual stuff, and secondarily that I just don’t like the album enough to spend two weeks writing on it.

The annoying thing about defining an era is that you can never quite escape it afterwards. Vocalcity is one of a small fraternity of turn-of-the-century electronic records that slightly older music nerd types absolutely lose their minds over, for reasons rarely unclear to either the modern, hip, handsome listener or myself. If you'll indulge me for a moment, an esoteric analogy for the place of this stuff in the world: in one of the Matrix sequels (the one with the two dreaded, dreaded albino twins), there's a scene where the aforementioned twins have to make an escape from a very fancy house.

This was difficult. At times, it felt like Iris Murdoch's own personal Hip Replacement - having fled London for the ugly, rural coast, a playwright presumes to write a memoir but inadvertently documents all that distracts him from his stated purpose. Nothing can dampen one's enthusiasm for a lifestyle more than someone else fictionalizing its logical extreme; who would have known that it's easier to pick out the shortcomings of a decision when it's framed as someone else's?