On Running With Scissors, Cavetown intelligently balances intimacy, alienation, and self-doubt, but uneven execution stops the album from fully delivering on its potential.
Reflecting on it, it’s a wonder I didn’t get into Cavetown sooner. Given he’s a trans artist that I’d seen floating around in the conversation in those circles an awful lot, you’d think I’d be using every excuse in the book to talk about him. With Running With Scissors, I wasn’t going to let him pass me by again, and while I’m glad I checked it out, I also can’t help but feel like it should be a lot better.
Maybe it’s the impact TikTok is having on song lengths, maybe it’s just Cavetown’s style, or maybe it’s just the natural shifting of the times, but I just wish otherwise good pop songwriters like Cavetown would sit with their ideas for a little longer, so we ended up with actual songs and not wispy fragments like ‘No Bark No Bite’ and ‘First Time’. Of course, there is an art to brevity, especially in the age of lightning in a bottle that we live in, but when both of these songs are actually really interesting and could have benefited from a bit more development – the former being about bigots trying and failing to express conventional masculinity in a convincing way and the latter about frustrations at law enforcement and beating yourself up about it – it makes you wonder why Cavetown couldn’t sit with a few of these ideas a little longer.
Among the highlights of the songs that feel more complete are the cute love songs like ‘Skip’, ‘Rainbow Gal’ and ‘Sailboat’ that do precisely what they’re designed to do down to a science – albeit the latter one with way too much sugary white noise thanks to underscores on production – but not all songs in this vein connect, and that’s an issue of tone. The mechanical dirge of ‘Baby Spoon’ complete with the line “it doesn’t have to be so hard” getting repeated creates an oddly demanding tone that does not fit a song about craving intimacy at all. At its worst you get a song like ‘Reaper’, a bleak track about mental health, so naturally you get the gurgly vocal production that sounds more goofy than suggesting any kind of downward spiral. Indeed, the overproduced vocals remain a constant frustration for me across this album.
But the truth is, I only highlight these moments in contrast to the glowing highs, of which there are many. The more abrasive grind of the guitars on ‘Cryptid’ was very welcome, especially with Cavetown calling out hypocrisy in transphobes right down to calling it a sickness, and ‘NPC’ is genuinely brilliant with its coursing rock guitars and cathartic lyrics about feeling like a passenger in your own life. The bleeping effects on the post-chorus are far more effective at creating a sense of uncertainty than the rampant overmixing that smothers much of the album.
In the end, I think Running With Scissors proves that Cavetown is absolutely a songwriter worth keeping an eye on, but that his music only works for me in small doses or in scattered moments rather than consistently. When the hooks hit hard and the emotional release feels earned, the scattered throughline of alienation, intimacy, and self-doubt feels almost tailor-made for me. When they don’t, this album ends up feeling like an incomplete statement. A good incomplete statement, but an incomplete statement nevertheless. But there’s no getting around it: when it works, it really works, and for that it deserves your attention. You might be surprised.
