Reporter's Notebook

This morning in New York, Hillary Clinton outlined her plan to combat ISIS, one that she called an “intensification” and “acceleration” of the existing strategy. As David pointed out, the problem for Hillary is that “talking about ISIS inevitably raises uncomfortable questions about the Obama administration’s handling of the group while she was the nation’s top foreign-policy official.”

And indeed, the plan she outlined goes beyond Obama’s; she renewed her calls for a no-fly zone (an option the administration has so far resisted), advocated “an immediate intelligence surge” in the region where ISIS operates to improve knowledge about the group’s inner workings, and advocated sending more Special Ops to help local fighters combat the group.

Of her tenure in the Obama administration, she said: “I have made clear that I have differences” with her former boss. The speech also highlighted the difference between her and the other Democratic candidates, who have yet to offer as much detail on their own anti-ISIS strategies. As 2 Chainz would say: “Middle finger up to my competition.”

A reader recommends this debut track from Apollo LTD. How Dusty Henry of Consequences of Sound hears it:

[Jordan Phillips and Adam Stark]’s expert grasp of the pop genre shines on the track. Each melody could be a hook in its own right, from the “na na na” opening to the elated falsetto in the chorus. Clinking piano chords and fuzzed out guitar riffs blend in the background, giving the song a slight rock edge without ever leaving pop territory. It’s a radio friendly single with bite, living up to the band’s proposed vision.

The last thing I listened to on Rdio (RIP) on a run yesterday was Grimes’s new album, “Art Angels.” From Hazel Cills’s recent review:

This year’s proven to be a good time for long-awaited comebacks. Sleater-Kinney hath returned, Joanna Newsom’s thrown her harp back into the ring, and Adele’s now knocking on your door with “Hello”. Meanwhile, fans are ready to bust down Rihanna and Frank Ocean’s doors for new albums. And Claire Boucher [of Grimes] too has been taking her sweet time to release her fourth record.

Last fall, she revealed that she scrapped her already highly-awaited follow-up to Visions because "it sucked." Then earlier this year she fed her fans one salvaged piece of the thrown-away project, the addictive "REALiTi", which was labeled a demo but sounds near-perfect. Somehow, it just made all the waiting worse. This is the sort of music Grimes was throwing away?

But “Flesh without Blood”, the first taste of her forthcoming album Art Angels, is here to stay. “You claw, you fight, you loo-oo-se,” she begins the four-minute track, a blow-out pop song. Running underneath the track’s punchy, metallic drums reminiscent of those on Visions is something new for Boucher: a pop-punk evoking guitar riff. Perhaps this is her take on "bro art," the loose term she’s used to describe the music that inspired Art Angels. But if there is anything bro-y about "Flesh without Blood", released with a video set in California’s kitsch hotel Madonna Inn, it’s that it has serious swagger as the album’s introduction.

Have a track to recommend for the feature? Email [email protected].

From Spencer’s new piece on the band caught in the middle of the mayhem on Friday:

Eagles of Death Metal play scuzzy, clever, loud blues rock that both celebrates and satirizes the idea of rock as an expression of macho, swaggering power. They have existed since 1998, and are known largely for their association with [Josh] Homme, whose other band is Queens of the Stone Age. [...] The main thing about the band, as fans who attended the Bataclan surely knew but the terrorists perhaps did not, is that they stand for good times. In the same Rolling Stone interview where world peace came up, their leader Jesse Hughes talked about the point of the band’s concerts. “We kind of have a rule with Eagles of Death Metal that it’s the fun show,” he said, “and we want everyone to belong.”

Exiting attendees of yesterday’s match at the Stade de France sing the French national anthem:

Spencer rejoices over the latest release from the inimitable Missy Elliott, her first new single in three years (her last album came out in 2005):

The lyrics aren’t quite as meaningless as the title would first suggest—the WTF here is not what the fuck, but “Where they from?” She’s rapping about dancing as sex as performance as rap, of course, as always. My favorite line on first spin: “Body be thick like a bisque.” The big question, for each listener, is how do they do it where you’re from?

Jamieson Cox catches us up on Missy’s whereabouts:

At her creative zenith, Missy made some of the funniest, most visually absorbing videos in the medium’s history — my favorite is probably “Work It,” [CB note: Here’s a collection of ten]. She’s returned to musical prominence in 2015 after almost a decade underground, time she spent struggling with Graves' disease and recording sporadic features and buzz singles. She stole the Super Bowl halftime show from ostensible headliner Katy Perry with a set that included “Get Ur Freak On,” “Work It,” and “Lose Control,” and she appeared on another artist’s comeback effort when she guested on Janet Jackson’s single “BURNITUP!” in September.

Jon Blistein adds:

A snippet of “WTF” has been floating around since late October, when ESPN started using it in commercials and other facets of its NBA coverage. In the weeks since, the rapper has regularly teased the track with emoji-laden missives on her twitter, and on Wednesday, she posted a still from the video on her new Instagram.

A song today for my grandfather, an Air Force veteran of Vietnam and Korea and a big fan of country western music:

I found it on a list of the 10 most mentioned songs by the hundreds of Vietnam vets interviewed by Doug Bradley and Craig Werner:

Our new book, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War shows how music helped soldiers/veterans connect to each other and to life back home and to cope with the complexities of the war they had been sent to fight. Many of the men and women we interviewed for We Gotta Get Out of This Place had never talked about their Vietnam war experience, even with their spouses and family members. But we found they could talk about a song — These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, My Girl, And When I Die, Ring of Fire and scores of others. And the talking helped heal some of  the wounds left from the war.

Forty years ago today, the Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the largest ships on the Great Lakes, broke apart and sank to the bottom of Lake Superior. She was the largest ship to go down in the Great Lakes, and the 29 men on her crew died, their bodies never recovered. No ship this big has sunk on the lakes since. The sinking of El Faro in October with 33 fatalities is, as far as I can tell, by far the deadliest American wreck since. There are still competing theories about what, exactly, happened.

A handsome and record-breaking ship, the Fitzgerald was well-known among shipwatchers when afloat, but now it’s best remembered through Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 hit “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The song is haunting if a bit maudlin, marrying cheesy ’70s guitar licks to folky storytelling. It fits into a long tradition of disaster folk songs, from shipwreck songs like “Sir Patrick Spens” and the Titanic-themed “When That Great Ship Went Down,”to later classic trainwreck chronicles—“The Wreck of the Old 97,” “Casey Jones”—all based (more or less) on historical incidents.

Will anyone write a folk song about El Faro? It seems unlikely. Just as the Edmund Fitzgerald was the last of the great wrecks on the Great Lakes, Lightfoot’s song may be the last great folk song about a ship- or trainwreck.

Spencer just reviewed a new Disco-esque single from Coldplay, “Adventure of a Lifetime,” which a reader calls “a bit bland”:

It’s Stargate radio fodder. “Sky Full Of Stars” is also fine as a pop song but it doesn’t really have any lyrics to speak of. I prefer the stuff like “Amsterdam,” [embedded above] “O,” “High Speed,” “Spies,” “Warning Sign” … the more haunting ones mostly.

Another reader takes a step back:

It must be frustrating to be a successful musician/band. Your fan base pretty much only wants certain types of songs, despite one’s creativity in other styles.

Another agrees: “Yeah, I feel as though most pop artists are caught between a rock and a hard place: change your style too much and people don’t like it, but don’t change it enough and you’ll be dismissed as a one-trick pony.” One more reader:

This is one reason why it’s somewhat preferable for a musician to work as part of a group. That group can then be associated with a particular musical style by fans, but if the individual artist wants to explore another style, s/he needs only to start or join another group.

Have a track to recommend for the daily feature? Drop us an email. The archive is here.

A reader writes:

This song has occupied my brain since I first heard it a few weeks ago. The melody, the mood, the lyric, they all resonate so deeply. The hammock, the Mayans, the searching. I can feel the old man I’ll be remembering how it felt to be the young man I was. So many times I've thought something along these lines:

I watch you braid your hair.
You’re from another time,
when the earth wasn’t so angry
and God was on our side.

It was one of my favorites from the summer, off The Internet’s Ego Death album, and they just came out with a video version a few weeks ago:

From Pitchfork’s Craig Jenkins’s review of the album:

Ego Death is both spare and quietly musical, its crisp low end anchored in hip-hop as the rest of the band coolly branches out into jazz, funk, and rock. Think of it as an offspring of early neo-soul pillars like Groove Theory and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, bedroomy but also lush and progressive. Ego Death is leagues too studiously retro to fit anyone’s idea of “alternative,” but it’s still plenty odd. These songs frequently take hard, unexpected turns: Opener “Get Away” is a tribal bass and percussion stomp in the verses (twice as sinister live) but gossamer and pretty around the choruses. “Gabby”’s hip-hop strut melts into a psychedelic waltz-timed coda adorned with pretty, wordless melodies from Janelle Monáe.

How Spencer describes it:

The third-to-last song on Chris Stapleton’s Traveller consists of six slow-burning minutes in which the bushy-bearded singer makes his career sound like a pretty big bummer. He drives all night to Billings; he sleeps all day in Utah; he can’t remember stopping in Denver—it’s all a wasted blur because “I live my illusion that somebody needs me to play.” The chorus ends, “I miss my son / I miss my wife / But the devil named music is taking my life.”

A reader comments on Stapleton winning “Best New Artist” at the Country Music Association awards on Wednesday night:

True connoisseurs of country have known about this kid for a long time. My hope is that he will continue to make that particular strain of music that puts most of the mainstream stars in the shade. Stapleton sings from the heart in a painful and sometimes very discomfiting manner. He confronts the struggles of substance abuse especially well. His music is full of very real expressions of regret but he does it without being preachy or condescending to those still locked in the unforgiving grip of addiction. For that I say thanks.