“I’m stupid, but I’m clever,” Sabrina Carpenter sings on “Lie to Girls,” a track from Short n’ Sweet. The line is a turnkey for the character the singer plays across the album’s 12 tracks: a girl next door pursued by clueless hunks (“A boy who’s jacked and kind/can’t find his ass to save my life,” she quips on “Slim Pickins”), the kind you might write off as “basic” before you discover that she has something unexpected to say. “Lie to Girls” offers sneakily incisive commentary on how guys puffing themselves up is futile because, if women are really interested in them, they’ll happily make excuses for their shortcomings.
On “Good Graces,” Carpenter presents herself as someone who’s prone to shift from adoration to hatred. This emotional mercuriality is reflected in the album’s music as it segues between a wide swath of genres and styles across its 36-minute runtime, never lingering on one for too long. “Lie to Girls” and “Slim Pickins” lean into lush folk-pop while “Bed Chem” features a trace of G-funk in its synth whistle, and, of course, “Espresso” boasts a disco-inflected groove.
Carpenter and her collaborators, who include Jack Antonoff on a third of the songs, deftly integrate an evolving tapestry of sounds, making for a near-seamless pop experience. Despite the buzzing pop-punk fake-out of the album’s opening track, “Taste,” Carpenter is more keen on acoustic stylings on Short n’ Sweet: Lightly strummed guitar percolates beneath the elegant “Please Please Please” and “Coincidence,” which subtly evokes Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi.”
The album’s cohesiveness also largely owes to Carpenter’s confidence on the mic. The singer turns potentially unwieldy lines like “This boy doesn’t even know/The difference between ‘there,’ ‘their’, and ‘they are’” into casual bits of effortless dialogue. And the choruses and verses melt into one another in a way that belies the songs’ rigorous pop structures.
Carpenter’s embrace of her sexuality throughout Short n’ Sweet is refreshingly frank. She candidly drops innuendos about “the whole package” and making “paintings with his tongue” on “Taste.” And she anticipates our preconceived notions about a woman’s sexual agency when she advises us not to “mistake [her] nice for naïve” on “Good Graces.”
At a time of when that agency is under assault, it feels downright subversive for Carpenter to reframe “Juno,” a song about maybe being okay with having her partner’s baby, into a treatise on how “fucking horny” she is. “Sorry if you feel objectified…give it to me, baby,” Carpenter declares—“it” being both a good time and (sure, why not) a kid too. These surprising flashes of wit make the competently crafted Short n’ Sweet much more than just a polished slice of pop.
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