Largely thanks to her juggernaut pop hit Espresso, Sabrina Carpenter has felt inescapable all summer long. Propelled by a bouncy, caffeinated reggae off-beat, and sleazing yowls of Italo Disco-styled electric guitar – along with an expertly-delivered one-liner: “I’m working late, ‘cos I’m a siinnngggeerrr” – it landed as a refreshing, fun new shake-up of pop’s ongoing obsession with championing the smooth, glossy disco revival.
But if you were expecting Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet to serve up a whole tray of freshly brewed Espressos, then think again: that song ends up feeling like a total outlier on an album that instead pulls from twanging country, Swiftian acoustic ballads, the sort of floaty R&B favored by Ariana Grande, and Eighties synth-pop. Though these are all perfectly serviceable pop songs, many of them end up feeling lightweight and derivative in comparison to its biggest hit.
Still, Carpenter made the right call on the lead singles. The self-referential, Kacey Musgraves-influenced country-pop song Please Please Please is by far the other stand-out, from the cheesy wink of its key change between verses, to Carpenter’s sheer relish as she belts out the line “I beg you, don't embarrass me, motherf**ker”.
The stomping next single Taste, which deals in messy rebounds and “one degree of separation”, sounds like Carpenter’s country-influenced take on a Liz Phair banger: fans have already speculated that it’s about Shawn Mendes getting back with his ex Camila Cabello right after he’d dated Carpenter. “I heard you're back together and if that's true, you'll just have to taste me when he's kissin' you,” she sings.
Building from twinkling guitars that sound like The Corrs’ Breathless, Juno is great fun, Carpenter declaring that she’s “so f**king horny” over hulking Eighties synths and schmaltzy guitar solos ripped straight out of a John Hughes film’s closing credits.
Elsewhere, though, Carpenter heavily overuses a very specific variety of talk-singing (singing the first half a line before tailing off into deadpan spoken-word) to the point that it hugely grates; Bed Chem is one of the strongest songs melodically, but some of Carpenter’s funniest lyrics (“Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?”) come off as overcooked and affected instead.
Aside from a handful of witty digs on Dumb & Poetic (“Try to come off like you're soft and well-spoken,” she sings, “Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen”) the slower ballads like Lie to Girls and Sharpest Tools are also major weak spots. Pulling heavily from Noughties R&B, Good Graces is virtually indistinguishable from an Ariana Grande song, and genre-wise, this record is fairly all over the place.
A bright n’ breezy pop album Short n’ Sweet is lacking in boldness – though it’s easy to see Taste sticking around all summer on the airwaves (and possibly Juno, too) a lot of this is rather less memorable. Clearly, Carpenter is at her best when her sharp sense of humour – and eye for a kitschy reference or two along the way – is given the proper room to shine. So here’s raising an Espresso to whatever comes next.
