If you allow your heart, your life to slow down these songs will aerate your bloodstream.

And then quicken your heart again. This Can’t Be My Life (Wrong Records) is a slice through someone’s body, looking at hidden beauties amid the mess.

Ruth Gerson’s series of stories pull at your conscience – like trials and unsettling events always do for the introspective.

She fell in the river before she could cry. The spring tide pulled her under. I jumped into save her, the waves came like fire. They pushed me aside as they flung her. Her neck snapped like a branch as her head hit the banks and the rocks ripped her blue dress right from her.”

From “Black Water”, those words happened to be the first I heard from Gerson’s new CD. Whispered, torn from her lips as if telling someone what she just saw, still standing out in the cold crying. A story that seems to be of untimely, violent, drowning death, through the voice of the murder. Yet it has a 1,000 interpretations and new ones come at each listen. The perfect picture of atmosphere and scene the words created made me turn my head sideways, quizzically, ready to believe there was something worth paying attention to.

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Savannah Jo Lack has a true, cold revenge voice that could work and be pushed at almost any tempo. Knitting Songs, released July 27, leaves you fondly wondering, where she’s going with it.

Via Australia, jazz infusion, the instrumental group Trinkets, and session play it becomes more and more clear in listening, where she’s been.

Two songs back to back cover so much territory. “Bitch” follows “Little Girl.” Though musically SJL easily covers the purity / whore spectrum fine, a dark dark cloud hovers over both songs. There’s no breeze pushing the bad smells away; nothing to cool the pain like a mother’s breath on a scary wound. Both are raw and open.

“Little Girl” goes through a series of childhood memories of people she knew back then, back when. The listener is never quite sure whether these are self-referential or just fictional observations of what might have happened. No doubt intended this way, the song is immature, it’s twee — despite the subject matter — with the reflective capacity, not of the adult looking back but the innocence of the girl only a few small steps removed from it all.

While a couple of phrases clang – “When I was just a little little girl, I had a best friend, her skin was black” – much more prominent is an angelic harmony that glides across the surface; bringing to mind the same girl spinning in slow motion across an ice rink’s oval, her breath clouding.

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