Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet Delivers a Perfect Pop Album with Empowering Storytelling.

The remaining eight tracks do not resemble the singles in terms of guitar and synthesized sound. Jack Antonoff's production is clearly visible, but versatile to say the least when it comes to capturing it in an album that is sweet and short indeed, and that can go unnoticed once the euphoria of the first two tracks is over. 

The album contains a classic vintage but modern vibe (like the music box sounds at the beginning of Don’t Smile, or the angelical “la la la’s” in Coincidence), with classic pop, R&B and pop-rock influences, but also features the impact from current artists like The Japanese House, which cannot go unnoticed in Taste’s indie-pop rhythm worthy of a The 1975’s classic. Almost the exact same thing happened with her previous album, emails i can’t send. The singer displays such a fun and careless personality that it may give off the wrong impression that that’s everything that’s to unpack. After releasing singles close to bubble-gum pop, nobody expects a Lie to girls; the same way nobody expected a because i liked a boy after Nonsense and Fast Times. 

But maybe that’s the problem with the average listener or critic. That (and bringing conceptualism back to the table), it is still difficult to appreciate a conceptualization that surrounds more than one genre. Without being a coming-of-age, Sabrina talks about herself in each and every one of her subjects discussed in a 36-minute record: her love experiences, the complications of being a woman in the youth-process, the sexual desire of a girl who’s already a quarter of century old... and not taking any of the above seriously. 

That is a kind of theoretical yet abstract notion and storytelling that, regardless of popular opinion, is still a hard pill to swallow. It doesn't matter how many girls come forward to explain their experiences as young women; there are never enough testimonies because time goes by, and people still don't take them seriously. Given her work as a lyricist, it’s necessary to target her songwriting in order to find a new and deeper meaning to songs such as Dumb & Poetic or Slim Pickins, that besides having a playful and sarcastic first layer, accompany and carry the scene, the album, and, above all, the artist's career as well as the path she seems to have chosen for this season. She is perhaps one of the singers whose stardom has taken the longest to be established, or at least rightfully recognized. 

15 years of character and style building that let us glimpse that there is in fact no distance between person and character; they are the same. It’s just Sabrina Carpenter. And that's why the public adores her. And that’s why she has created the almost perfect non-skip summer album. Because she is indeed a careless yet involved in an unhinged and natural way girl that resembles those of the Disney era; a world she has long belonged to. In the same way as Chappell Roan, Sabrina belongs to the generation that grew up worshipping Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez as Disney Channel and worldwide teenage stars, and is loaded with references and models to echo and complement with actual pop culture facts. It is noticeable when there is an artistic ensemble that goes beyond the recording studio and includes projects in different arts such as video. 

Appearing on television (especially at such an early age) makes you master the art of camera interaction to levels others can only aspire to, and fills you up with a kind of visual culture that will be permanently imprinted and serve as a reference for future projects such as Taste, which bursts with allusions to Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn’s “Death Becomes Her”, “Kill Bill”, “Ginger Snaps”, “Scream”, “Psicosis” and “The Addams”, among others. Sabrina Carpenter is not inventing anything; she’s simply bringing back a type of joy that young women have been denied from for an embarrassingly long time. And that is simply more than enough to be a successful superstar, to set an example, and to advice people to have fun and take everything with a pinch of salt. That’s what’s really short n’ sweet.