The sentiments on Sabrina Carpenter’s sixth album are ‘Short n’ Sweet’ like the title, this flirtatious play on the singer’s height setting the tone for a record that refuses to sink into earnestness. With old-style glamour and an uncannily rehearsed spontaneity, at once hypnotic and tongue-in-cheek, the former child star neatly rounds off a summer that has brought the fun back into pop music.
Carpenter describes the record as an ‘ovulation album,’ and there is certainly a flushed thrill as she pulls the listener easily through a series of concise, silkily produced melodies. Her sex positivity brings a caffeinated thrill to leading single ‘Espresso’ and the clumsy capacity to misguide on ‘Lie to Girls,’ and also informs the empty innuendo of the viral ‘nonsense outros’ on her latest tour.
Despite this sparkling buoyancy, the dating world that Carpenter paints is rife with disappointment. Amid the honeymoon highs of ‘Bed Chem’ the inevitability of regret looms like a seasonal cycle, and at these points Carpenter takes on the cadence of a weary country singer, resigned on ‘Slim Pickins’ to accept that “the good ones are deceased or taken”. Yet through these oscillations, escapism prevails and Carpenter flicks between radio-ready earworms with little time to sigh.
She speaks to female self-protection, the male love objects reduced to diversions and accessories, like the lines of Kens on a 60s postcard beach in the ‘Espresso’ Video – “he looks so cute wrapped around my finger”. The perspective is removed from emotion; to tarnish a woman’s ego is the greatest sin in her world, though she mocks her own ability to fall for it with an equally light touch. The relentlessly palatable soundscape is slyly undercut by this detached and long-suffering attitude, her quips and wordplay sublime in their knowing smoothness. Subtly smart yet resolutely silly, Carpenter’s charm has rightfully captured the culture.
