Movement is what draws all of Sarah Kinlaw’s work together. The New York-based multidisciplinary artist creates in ways that explores each field and weaves them all together; her movement is musical and her music is motion. She rejects what she calls “traditional ways of working”, instead opting to create and write in ways that feel right to her body. “Almost every time I dealt with anger around language and writing, my fix was to move,” she explains of her process. When feeling stuck, Kinlaw’s solution is literally to move herself free.
On her new album, gut ccheck, Kinlaw’s somatic music feels even more tied to this approach. Compared to her 2021 debut album The Tipping Scale, gut ccheck is more angular, more dynamic, and more avant. Even the title has a movement to it, a stuttering phrase with a certain belly kick to it. Her words glide between itchy beats and industrial groans of noise, vowels and syllables both hooks and anchors; there’s a captivating fluidity about her here. As a student of psychoacoustics and neuropsychology, Kinlaw understands the effects of deep sounds, emotional reactions, and specific tonal power and the impact they all have on listeners. At times gut ccheck feels like music emerging from nothingness (which isn’t wholly surprising since she spent two years as a resident at Bell Labs, working in its famous anechoic chamber); she’s highly attuned to the response her music will invoke, from each sonic detail to exact and particular way she utters a word.
With a brand of electronic, trap, and artpop that often veers into stark spoken word verses and bridges, comparisons to Jenny Hval and FKA Twigs that The Tipping Scale brought about still apply here. There’s also more influences on gut ccheck to find. When she drops her voice to an exasperated gasp on “HEAVY HEAD” and a matter-of-fact exhaustion on “RULE OF THIRDS”, the resemblance to Laurie Anderson is uncanny. Elsewhere on “HILLBILLY” she adopts a Southern drawl, channeling Cowboy Carter-era Beyoncé. Final track “THE PASSENGER” is perhaps the lightest thing here, a soothing and shimmering slice with its roots in ambience and Caroline Polachek-like soaring indie pop, while the vocal manipulations on tracks like “HARD CUT” and “SPIT” take cues from hyperpop.
Most surprising is that gut ccheck rarely feels disjointed or disparate. Even with a number of short interludes peppered through the 14 tracks, Kinlaw shifts between them with a deliberate ease. While some songs feel like bridges between stronger moments (“BIGGER THAN U”, “OVERTIME”), the peaks are worth the short journey. The way “SPIT” contrasts ringing snare hits against deadpan vocals while creating a definitive sense of motion is genuinely dazzling. The metallic groans of “HEAVY HEAD” are almost suffocating, Kinlaw sounding like she’s running to catch up to the beat. “RIDE THE RIDE”, borne from internalised frustration, captures the visceral picture of Kinlaw crawling on the floor, whispering into the microphone. It all comes back to movement. It’s the lifeblood of Kinlaw’s art, and with gut ccheck we have an inspired album of music that evokes, inspires, and captures movement in an almost visceral, tangible way.
