Review: Sabrina Carpenter explores bad boyfriend behavior

POP/ROCK

Sabrina Carpenter “Short n’ Sweet” (Island)

In Carpenter’s songs, young romance is all sexy fun and games — until it’s not. “Short n’ Sweet,” her sixth full-length album, is a smart, funny, cheerfully merciless catalog of bad boyfriend behavior and the deceptions and rationalizations that enable it. Carpenter mostly smiles and winks her way through songs that recognize the irrational power of lust, but deftly twist the knife on cheaters and hypocrites. “No one’s more amazing at turning loving into hatred,” she warns in “Good Graces.”

Carpenter, 25, has triumphed in a career path that doesn’t always work out: spending her teens in show business. A contest entry for “The Next Miley Cyrus Project,” in 2011, led to Carpenter joining the Disney entertainment empire: signing to Disney’s Hollywood Records and gaining recognition with acting roles on the Disney Channel series “Girl Meets World” and in movies. Her Hollywood albums tried on teen-pop styles with middling results, gradually easing toward more adult material.

But she gained full artistic control with a new label, Island, and her 2022 album, “Emails I Can’t Send,” made the leap into her grown-up persona: equal parts playful, vulnerable, amorous and calculating.

“Short n’ Sweet” arrives powered by two ubiquitous summer hits. One is “Espresso,” a retro disco-pop groove carrying the boast of a confident hottie: “He looks so good wrapped around my finger,” she coos. The other, “Please Please Please,” begs an unstable boyfriend not to embarrass her in public. “Whatever devil’s inside you, don’t let him out tonight,” she admonishes, then sings “Please, please, please, don’t prove I’m right,” in the sugariest of harmonies.

Like Olivia Rodrigo — a fellow Disney alum — Carpenter can see the comedy in romance gone wrong. Her voice is often teasingly sardonic, observing her own mistakes with a poised smirk while she skewers the offenders. “Dumb & Poetic” demolishes a pretend-sensitive guy, giving him a “gold star for highbrow manipulation”; it’s set to the kind of acoustic-guitar waltz that sensitive guys might favor. But she also recognizes her own susceptibility. In “Lie to Girls,” she explains to a persistently lapsing partner that he doesn’t even have to make excuses: “If they like you they’ll just lie to themselves.”

In “Sharpest Tool,” Carpenter confronts someone who drew her into intimacy, then “found God at your ex’s house” and “logged out, leaving me dumbfounded.” It’s a Minimalist matrix of guitar picking, electronics and vocals, all tension and syncopation.

Like other 21st-century pop pros, Carpenter has no loyalty to any era or approach. “Short n’ Sweet” reaches back to disco, Janet Jackson, quiet-storm R&B, Laurel Canyon folk-pop, 1990s grunge and indie-rock, scrambling its references with 21st-century studio technology. “Coincidence” zeros in on someone whose ex is back in his life with hearty guitar strumming, “na na na na” harmonies and leaping melody lines that hark back to Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills and Nash. “Slim Pickins” uses string-band country picking to complain about how she has to settle for second-rate men because “the good ones are deceased or taken.”

“Taste,” the album’s brash opener, is another jab at someone who has returned to an ex. It’s an indie-rocker with chugging electric-guitar chords, and instead of attacking the guy, it taunts her rival: “You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissing you.” Carpenter’s tone is perky and smug, as if she’s over it but just wants to have her say. She’s mocking, not suffering.

JON PARELES, New York Times

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