New Recordings: Liz Longley; Clipping; Travis Scott

Weightless

(Sugar Hill ***1/2)

nolead ends Liz Longley opens her second album for a national label with "Swing," a declaration of independence in which the singer expresses a desire to test limits: "I just wanna swing . . . further than I've ever been, only to come back." It sets the tone for a set that finds the Nashville-based Chester County native and Downingtown High West graduate navigating often rocky emotional terrain with the depth, unsparing honesty, and grace of a master singer-songwriter. Longley is as good here singing about cutting ties and moving on, as she does on "Weightless," as she is confessing to dependency - "Be my oxygen," she pleads on the album closer.

The music is just as assured and fully realized, a sturdily melodic pop-based sound that ranges from just piano and voice to almost orchestral rock. It all adds up to an engrossing whole in which Longley consistently engages the listener to - in a line from "Swing" - "be here in this moment."

- Nick Cristiano

nolead begins Clipping
nolead ends nolead begins Splendor and Misery
nolead ends nolead begins (Sub Pop/Deathbomb Arc ***)

nolead ends If there were any question how Daveed Diggs' success in Broadway's biggest story in years, Hamilton, would affect his avant, little noise-rap trio, Splendor and Misery's 90-second interlude, "Long Way Away," answers it with a bit of a cappella gospel. Then "True Believer" chimes in with a jaunty, "Dixie"-style singsong. With far more drones than drums on hand, Clipping's sophomore outing is a sci-fi concept opus fitting of both Diggs' fussily intricate bars and his bandmates' musique concrète machinations. Splendor and Misery is far more evenhanded and listenable than 2014's Clppng (no rapping over alarm clocks!), but it still dodges hooks enough to make Death Grips comparatively Lennon/McCartney. "All Black" name-checks Kendrick Lamar's infamous "Control" verse - now there's a guy who knows how to make the avant songful.

- Dan Weiss

nolead begins Travis Scott
nolead ends nolead begins Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight
nolead ends nolead begins (Epic **1/2)

nolead ends Rihanna and Coldplay may have been headliners at Made in America, but the festival's MVP was rapper Travis Scott. When not hanging with attendee Bill Clinton, Scott climbed into a tall tree to perform his elastic "3500" for the stage highlight of MIA. Note to live performers: Pyrotechnics and elaborate lights aren't necessary when you have spreading oaks and a willingness to clamber. And Scott's surprise new album, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, is as daring and rowdy as his skyward climb.

Boisterous, rapid-fire effusion and trumpeting Auto-Tuned rap are part of his shtick. So, too, are allegorical (or awkward and blunt on the cocaine-addled "Biebs in the Trap") takes on drugs and mind-expansion, witnessed here, most prominently, on "Through the Late Night" with Kid Cudi barking and snarking their way through LSD chatter.

The drugs stuff is meh. What's more solid are Scott's personal, amusing stories told in the slipperiest of flows. "Way Back" tells of Scott's bruised childhood, with irked indicators of his present and future. And "Pick Up the Phone," a duet with Young Thug (who released last week's fine Jeffery mixtape) is the best track on the album - a weird, smashing comic take on cellular communication that meets Drake and the Jerky Boys halfway.

- A.D. Amorosi

Kishi Bashi, Sonderlust; Mac Miller, The Divine Feminine; Usher, Hard II Love; Bobby Rush, Porcupine MeatEndText