The Review: On 'Short n' Sweet,' Sabrina Carpenter Packs a Wallop of Irresistible Wit
The pint-sized pop star's sixth album reconciles faux arrogance with underlying feelings of insecurity, delivering a delightful collection of kiss-offs as sharp as they are hilarious.
Welcome back to Top Shelf, Low Brow. This is The Review, a regular edition that looks closer at movies, music, and television. This week it’s Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, a throwback to mid-2000s folk-pop filled with wry jokes that affirms Carpenter’s breakthrough is well-earned.
The title of Sabrina Carpenter’s sixth album, Short n’ Sweet, asks us to reckon with an interesting double entendre. There’s the plain and direct meaning that references Carpenter’s itty bitty height—which, if that somehow flew past you, is clarified on album opener “Taste,” when Carpenter snarls, “Oh, I leave quite an impression, five feet to be exact.” Then there’s the less apparent significance of Short n’ Sweet, which sees this 12-song record clocking in at a compact 36 minutes.
No one wants to read the fiftieth think piece about how TikTok, Instagram, and the rise of “trending audio” clips that amount to 15 seconds of a popular song have reduced the length of your average pop track to a Spotify ad. That doesn’t, however, mean that this fad is any less aggravating. While commemorating the 16th anniversary of Lady Gaga’s The Fame on a recent afternoon, I was taken aback remembering just how much meat there is on the bones of those songs. There are intros, outros, features, pre-choruses, and, most importantly, bridges. Even shorter tracks like “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” and “Money Honey” are made into album standouts by how much personality and theatricality Gaga imbued into her vocal performance.
Sabrina Carpenter and Lady Gaga are—how do I put this nicely?—obviously not artists whose oeuvre is necessarily comparable. But while making my way through Short n’ Sweet, I couldn’t help but think of The Fame, and the calculated, cunning ways that artists can make a song memorable despite a contracted length. A little bit of clever lyricism and vocal inflection can go a long way in making a track stand out, especially with a pop scene more saturated than it has ever been thanks to streaming becoming the preferred mode of listening over physical media that demands you digest an album top to bottom.
On Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter expands on the winking, coquettish identity she began to hone on 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, exploring how to use charm in her favor. In a time when both her contemporaries and the 2010s pop stars who paved the way for the new generation are struggling to combine personality with whatever trendy sonic palette is popular this week, Carpenter veers left. Instead of watered-down synth pop, drum and bass music designed to fit snugly into the background of a “Get Ready with Me” video, or the already-tapering pop-punk revival, she aims for classic over fashionable.
The album’s soundscape is homogenous without being overly repetitive and its lyrics are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. The quietly shifting variety of folksy subgenres meld seamlessly, and even if Carpenter never once pushes a single boundary, Short n’ Sweet is still an amiable experience because of the candor that lurks just beneath all of the singer’s humor. This is a record about lingering insecurity dressed up as an album about being the hottest, most fuckable, vengeful soap opera villain. And, like a soap, there’s a hypnotic quality that holds attention all the way through, even if a layer of artifice stays firmly planted between the artist and her audience.
That much should’ve been expected from “Espresso” alone. I was a truther from day one, predicting that coffee carol would be one of the year’s defining songs just a few days after it was released, in this review I wrote at The Daily Beast in another lifetime. That’s both an excuse to remind you that I am an experienced trend forecaster (and that you should subscribe to the newsletter you’re reading right now), and that Carpenter has a preternatural ability to turn the absolute stupidest lyrics into surefire hooks. No matter how many times I’ve heard it and how many memes it has spawned, every time I hear “that’s that me espresso,” I am sublimated by its charm. Who could possibly resist that, even if it has proliferated culture to the point of being entirely inescapable?
It’s a brilliant bait-and-switch that Short n’ Sweet is full of songs that, for the most part, sound nothing like the ’60s beach pop of “Espresso,” yet don’t shirk the necessary shots of silliness that the song was able to inject into the culture. “Dumb & Poetic,” which immediately follows “Espresso” in the center of the album, immediately strips back the energy with its strumming acoustic guitar, but keeps the absurdity and punchlines coming. “Try to come off like you’re soft and well-spoken…” Carpenter sings, teeing up her zinger: “...Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen.” It’s one of the first moments on the album where Carpenter actually reveals how upset she is. Her anger over a self-righteous ex seeps out of the one-two punch line “You’re so empathetic, you’d make a great wife/I promise the mushrooms aren’t changing your life.”
Ostensibly, a large portion of the record is about Carpenter’s brief relationship with Shawn Mendes, which happened between Mendes’ two stints with Camila Cabello. (Thank you to everyone tweeting memes about this, following a celebrity relationship sounds like cannonballing into hellfire for me.) It’s nice that Carpenter is getting her licks back, even if taking shots at a guy whose music is so fucking grating and rote is an easy target. Carpenter works through the inevitable confusion of that experience, and we even get to indulge in a guilty pleasure that women in pop will so rarely grant us anymore: songs about another woman stealing your man.
Girl-on-girl crime has become outmoded in Taylor Swift’s “women must always support other women” world. It’s one of the reasons that the Gossip Girl reboot didn’t work—a little slut-shaming can be part of the good, (not so) clean fun of being an adult, in adult relationships, with bad breakups! “Taste” allows us to dip our toes back into that feeling of naughtiness, with a damn good hook that shrugs, “You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissing you!” Remarkably, almost every other line in the song is executed with such pitch perfection that it, too, could be considered a hook—how delightfully fitting for a song that’s basically about having the most addictive pussy game on earth. She implicates both parties a few songs later on the fireplace jam band “Coincidence,” suspicious of how her man’s strange behavior aligns with an ex of his being in town. (“What a surprise, your phone just died / Your car drove itself from L.A. to her thighs.”)
But despite her height, you cannot keep a horny girl down. Heartbreak isn’t enough to shatter Carpenter, and she uses sex as equal parts revenge and rebound. Lust is where she finds some of her funniest lyrics on the whole album. The groovy “Bed Chem” is so reminiscent of plush red velvet and the sound of the bubbles in your champagne that it could easily fit onto a modern Chromeo album. The second verse is hit after hit: “Come right on me, I mean camaraderie!/Where are thou? Why not uponeth me?”
And then there’s “Juno.” One of the things about Carpenter as an artist is that a song called “Juno” could be about the town in Alaska, the Jason Reitman movie, or a play on words (“did ju-no you broke my heart?” or something far more sharp—I’m not the songwriter here!). Ultimately, Carpenter zeroes in on Reitman’s 2007 smash indie film, fantasizing about a similar love that’s so potent and lustful that she can’t help but want to have the guy’s kids. It takes a whole lot of chutzpah to make a song where you’re just moaning about how desperately you want to be rawdogged, but I’ve never known a short girl who isn’t absolutely brimming with confidence. (They can also fight, and Carpenter really hammers down both of those personality facets on this album.) In the bridge, she lays all her cards down and stops with the games. “Adore me, hold me and explore me/I’m so fuckin’ horny!”
All of this self-assurance considered, it would be easy to mistake Short n’ Sweet as an album absent of regret and diffidence. Comedian Joel Kim Booster tweeted that the record doesn’t have “a single drop of angst or insecurity” and that Carpenter is “selling the cool girl who doesn’t give a fuck in a way that doesn’t feel fake or desperate.” While there’s some merit to that observation when considering the songs individually, I’d argue that framing the entire album that way is a misread. Its closing track, “Don’t Smile,” reveals that Carpenter’s poise throughout Short n’ Sweet is something of an act. “Don’t smile because it happened, baby, cry because it’s over/You’re supposed to think about me every time you hold her,” she sings in the chorus.
That last line drips with melancholic realization. It’s the distilled feeling of recognizing that, despite putting on a brave face and acting like you’re hot shit, your ex might still be happier with someone else. No amount of songs that manifest their regret like a curse can change a reality where someone else is better off without you.
That’s the note Carpenter chooses to leave us on, woefully repeating, “I want you to miss me” as the album finishes. She wants us to understand that a week full of good days can be brought down by just one bad one. Getting over someone takes time, and no amount of rebound sex with idiot boys, caffeine, and Oscar-winning movies from the aughts can change that. It’s this sensitivity that gives Short n’ Sweet the edge of humanity it needs. Carpenter doesn’t need the ostentatious, flowery metaphors that have crowded Taylor Swift’s last few albums to convey her feelings—Carpenter’s wordplay is funny in the way that Taylor Swift thinks she still is—or the stylish yet hollow electronic flourishes of Camila Cabello’s C,XOXO to capture our attention. (Though, one can’t help but wish Carpenter would take a jab at something a little less safe in the way that Cabello did this summer, but maybe that’ll arrive next time.) Her modern take on 2006-era folksy pop is sonically unconventional enough to turn heads.
So many artists are so hyper-focused on reaching for a hit that the resulting songs are devoid of personality. Carpenter makes hit-making look effortless, the mark of someone whose songs are crafted with so much intention that they feel simple and uncomplicated, even though making such undeniable earworms is a complex art. Carpenter isn’t just playing with the folksy pop of 2006-era Jenny Lewis and Kate Nash, she’s matching their penchant for humor too. A heavy dose of cursing and punchlines ask you to listen intently, making the 36-minute-long Short n’ Sweet feel all the more lengthy, especially since all you’ll want to do is listen again as soon as it ends.
