It was a matter of time, after all the young audience already knew Sabrina Carpenter from her past as an actress, in addition to a very long career in the recording industry that slowly highlighted her potential as a singer-songwriter. The time to move on to Island, take her first steps in the dangerous world of major with an album with a relative response (“emails i can't send”) and the dish was ready for a young promise to become an international phenomenon. Doll look pin-upan irreverent attitude just enough to dress up the archetype of the intriguing little bitch, an even more decisive immersion in the torrid Californian atmospheres of the Seventies, and success arrives like an avalanche. With two steamroller singles like “Espresso” and “Please Please Please”, ubiquitous to the point of nausea, as well as a carefully studied image (note also the video produced for the occasion), “Short N' Sweet” manages to cement the status of Carpenter as a rising star of the Anglophone pop scene, promising precisely what the two adjectives in the title announce. This compactness speaks in favor of the project.
Let's start with the two singles. Despite the incredible pervasiveness, of tails of Playlist where finding one of the two was almost a given, the stylistic choices adopted for both best present the aesthetics of the album, easily dismissible with a generic “vintage” label, but in reality much more composite than it might seem. On the one hand “Espresso” further extends the last nu-disco season through a lively exercise that draws from eighties funk and city-pop (showing once again the enormous influence exerted by “Say So” by Doja Cat), on the other hand “Please Please Please” plays with Carpenter's interpretation through sunny yacht-pop atmospheres, in a delicate game of riff guitar and synthetic fantasies.
With a composite production, which in addition to the parsley Jack Antonoff makes use of the duo John The Blind/Ian Kirkpatrick and Julian Bunetta, the album proceeds back and forth in the line that connects its dance instincts (the distorted 2-step of “Good Graces”, influenced by the British garage season) to the more rock inclinations (the progression heartland of “Sharpest Tool”, the collegial instincts of “Taste”), grinding out sixty years of American pop without a hitch.
Not everything really works as he would like: dull country ballads like “Slim Pickins” can give Carpenter the opportunity to show off his velvet timbre, but they do little to change the economy of an album that draws better energy from the ideas. freestyle of “Bed Chem” (not far from Carly Rae Jepsen's “Dedicated”) or a chorus like that of “Juno”, which in other times could easily be classified as “radiophonic”.
Even the choral attitude of “Coincidence” throws into disarray a melody that would have instead benefited from a greater measure, the one that for example circumscribes the conclusive bedroom pop of “Don't Smile”. The irreverence is best identified in the lyrics, in the recriminations and in the reversals of perspective, a role play in which the character and the boldness of the character emerge best. There are even those who rumor that the most intimate pieces concern an alleged love triangle with the other corners covered by none other than Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes; gossip aside, Sabrina Carpenter's rise to the upper levels of the pop firmament has been supported with an adequate structure, in which the outline and the substance proceed hand in hand. We'll see if she'll be able to keep the flame alive.
26/08/2024
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
