Sabrina Carpenter – Short ‘n’ Sweet Review

Pop summer may be over but the endless cycle of work, of plugging schedule gaps and covering trips to Liverpool to see Bob Dylan, is not. Sabrina Carpenter will do. Her burst onto the scene with Short ‘n’ Sweet seemed inevitable. Such is the life of someone who opens for the never-ending Taylor Swift Eras tour. Like Dylan it will never end, but not as quick to get a chart-topping success. Six albums in and Carpenter has caught up to the sound of the time, the noise which makes people tick. For all the praise we can heap on the pop genre and its variety, the overwhelming feature, from so-called new voices like Carpenter or veteran hands like Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars, is a generic flow. A shallow message where a listener can apply themselves and their banal, everyday experiences to the flow of someone who knows how to hold a note. Such is the success of Short ‘n’ Sweet

Songs of jealousy and regret are first up with Taste and the insufferably catchy Please Please Please. Carpenter experiments with a catchy tempo for her listeners in the same way scientists condition dogs to feel hungry when hearing a bell. Short ‘n’ Sweet is a collection of singles, disconnected from one another yet telling the same story. The highs and lows are conditional on a listener but the consistency is in Carpenter’s pruned pop voice. Enjoyable parts, definitely, but ultimately the self-referential moments of Please Please Please or Espresso are lost to the lacklustre but genuine message. All of these songs are attempts at being defiant in the face of an ending relationship and yet instead of moving on all Carpenter can do is obsess over it because it is what proves relatable, and popular, to her audiences. This ironic display of not caring yet being moved enough to write a near forty minutes of pop-slop is Short ‘n’ Sweet’s unfortunate undoing.  

Pop music lacks defiant characters. It can no longer provide something new to listeners because those who advocate for the genre most of all require the message prescribed to be spelled out. Detail and depth are not what the genre can offer anymore and instead, the hand-holding throughout, the catchy but futile instrumental range heard in Short ‘n’ Sweet, is more an affliction than an adaptation of true feelings. Where is the volatility? What of the charm or deflation heartbreak brings? Nowhere. It is all a projection of the listener on an artist than anything the artist can provide. It is a shame to waste a voice as strong, cheery, and pop-oriented as Carpenter’s but this has been the case for her prior releases. Expecting a change now the spotlight is on her, in no part thanks to the interest of Swifties, would be foolish. What we are left with are trite conclusions on songs with a small puddle of depth. 

And yet to not expect anything more from Short ‘n’ Sweet than summer pop melodies and breakup fundamentals is to lower the bar for the genre. Carpenter is merely a symptom of a wider problem. She has done nothing right or wrong with this album, a middle-of-the-road effort which has no highlights beyond those which are TikTok fodder. This is the genre now. It has evolved to its next stage but the floorboards are creaking, the stage dusty with disinterest. For all its lacklustre, nostalgic riffs (Bed Chem) and vague hopes (Don’t Smile), this is where the bar for pop lay. Espresso remains a sickeningly coy song, as does the rest of Short ‘n’ Sweet.

Underwhelming work from an artist who has had more than enough time to figure out the specifics, to sift through the highs and lows of romantic involvement and specify, to radicalise her work. No dice. Carpenter follows in the footsteps of lowly genre expectations and is better off for it on the popularity conveyor belt. Even those moments which should flourish feel burnt out by the genre. The defiance heard on Dumb & Poetic still tries to sympathise with the boy playing man, the role expectations of the relationships we hear in pop music still push on, unchanged by experiences of heartbreak or hope for a brighter future. Carpenter has trialled just about every category of the genre she can, from the lowercase titles of Phoebe Bridgers on previous album emails i can’t send to the self-made era fumble of Singular Act I and II. After so many shortcomings, the Swift-inclined Short ‘n’ Sweet is her breach of the charts. Why change now?