Pennsylvania-born singer-songwriter and actress Sabrina Carpenter has released her fifth studio album titled Short n’ Sweet, two years after the critical and commercial success of Emails I Can’t Send. Foreshadowed by a pair of 2024 MTV Video Music Award-nominated singles “Please, Please, Please” and “Espresso”, the American pop superstar extends her featureless album run with her latest LP, running with the baton passed from her previous project and crafting a body of work in which she monopolises the spotlight.
A thirty-six-minute album, Short n’ Sweet is a curt pop album whose creative direction branches out and bears fruit in the shape of rock, R&B, and country. Within thirteen songs, Sabrina populates the cobweb-like production with youthful but oft-times derisive songwriting extracted either from lived-experienced or derivative narratives sourced straight from the trite pages of pop culture. Whether she pitches her vocal register to conjure sexual imagery (“Bed Chem”) or she thins her delivery to a honey-smooth consistency to administer the slow poison of void rebukes (“Dumb and Poetic”), Sabrina’s vocal performances fill out the shape of the scantly tailored sound ecosystem, creating musical stability that enables her to shift forms, tones, and moods at will, obviating the need for guest appearances.
Listen to “Bed Chem”:
The thematic foundation on which Short n’ Sweet is built is a snobbish co-mingle of post-breakup life, toxic love, and romantic frustration held together by Sabrina’s penchant for abandoning herself to toxic tendencies. The album also expands upon the core essence of such broken love by exploring how these dynamics are affected by feminism, self-affirmation, sex positivity.
The 25-year-old dons the persona of a woman who understands her worth; however, her expression of this commodity is pervasively without grace and tact. Her venomous lyrics and mockery-inclined approach, as best encapsulated by songs such as “Good Graces” and “Sharpest Tool”, paint Carpenter in a somewhat embittered light. It’s difficult to parse between justice and judgement when most of the songs are riddled with spiteful scenarios and jeers concerning the intelligence of men within the dating pool. That’s the shortfall of the album. Sabrina allows herself to be consumed by the shadows of her wounds more than she permits herself the grace to accept that she made a mistake by pursuing unhealthy love not up to her standard. The picture that surfaces, because of this, is that of a juvenile woman who’d rather resort to insults rather than looking at herself and seeing where she might have been complicit in her unhappiness.
Listen to “Good Graces”:
The best parts of the album, and the artist herself, manifest not when she’s trying to bash men for kicks, but as a sincere lesson meant to be heeded and remembered. Exhibits of such moments can be heard on “Coincidence” and “Dumb and Poetic”, where she either confronts an inconsistent cheater or reminds a chauvinist of his place in society as one of the dregs. There isn’t that much a difference between caustic Carpenter and straight-shooting Sabrina, but the latter is the one who manages to strike a balance between standing up for herself and telling off a good-for-nothing lowlife for wasting her time and emotions.
Short n’ Sweet is a collage of a woman who is evidently in pieces but is doing her utmost best to put herself together. However, like all collages, the album is coarse-edged, disjointed, and feels too single-toned. The voice is there, along with the musical IQ. But there’s a sense of incompletion to the album’s semblance. It’s easy to tell that it’s an album of brokenness, and there’s a lingering frustration left by the verdicts Sabrina passes throughout the album because they all come from a place of single-mindedness rather than the desire to achieve understanding.
