Sabrina Carpenter has been on the rise ever since she toured on the Era’s Tour with Taylor Swift. After being in the industry for many years, her songs “Nonsense,” “Feather,” and “because i liked a boy” blew up when people saw her charisma on stage opening for Swift’s tour.
The album consists of 12 tracks and the cover displays Carpenter as the main center. To me, this cover led me to believe that her vintage flair would be continued into this album.
Carpenter has created such a prominent fashion style in her career. It’s vintage and it’s flowy and fun, so my biggest anticipation for this album was to see if she could carry a distinct style in her music.
In the album, she had sounds reminiscent of Taylor Swift, K-Pop, and heavy country influences throughout all the songs. While I have never seen a problem with having inspiration from other artists, I did find myself waiting for her specific sound in the album, something that made me be like “Wow, this is so her.” It felt like a continuation of other artists. The only thing I found to be unique to her was the country style carried through this pop album.
The whole album sounds like she is searching for her sound. Clinging to different styles of music. While that doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t know your sound, listeners like me should still be able to hear the artist in their songs. That is what makes the music exciting and enjoyable.
“Short N’ Sweet” is fun to listen to, the songs weren’t badly produced, and it wasn’t necessarily what I would call a “bad” album, but I wanted more. More of the Sabrina Carpenter style that was seen in “Feather” and “Nonsense.”
This album’s strongest aspect was the lyrics. Carpenter has a way of writing her lyrics that is so jarring to hear against the instrumental and I am honestly so into it. I have yet to hear someone in her genre shock me in that way and I am happy she was the one to do it.
I was baffled by the reoccurring country themes throughout the songs. I usually get obsessed with albums where the artist uses a new sound, but this one just didn’t do it for me. It did not fit her voice, and it honestly was all too much. I can appreciate most of these songs for not overdoing the old country, slightly bluegrass, style. She suppressed her best vocals to try to fit the southern style of the banjo heavy instrumentals, taking away from the quality of the music that she has the potential to create.
The whole album confused my ears. There were way too many instances of her singing way higher than she needed to be. “Please, Please, Please” fell victim to this head voice and I think it took away from the song itself. I was waiting to hear Carpenter’s true singing voice, such as the one used on her songs “Dumb and Poetic” and “Don’t Smile,” not the high pitched falsetto that she used for most of this album. Her voice on those two songs gave me an out of body experience, they proved to me how impressive and charming Carpenter’s voice is.
The songs I ended up enjoying the most on this album were “Espresso,” “Sharpest Tool,” and “Good Graces.” To me, they were what I wanted to hear from Carpenter.
The vocals on “Sharpest Tool” were gorgeous, the vocal layering is chill worthy. She also used a full-on singing voice which automatically made me give it a thumbs up.
“Good Graces” reminded me of a K-Pop song and had major elements of hyper pop which I was obsessed with. Truly some great work was done on those two songs.
Honorable mention goes out to “Bed Chem.” This song had such a groovy percussion line to it. The wind chimes, the claves, the drums, it was all so captivating and made me genuinely love this song.
Overall, this is a good album to have under her belt for her career, but I expect more from the next one. I give this album a 4 out of 5 stars. It was a great album, but the country and high-pitched singing really took this album down a level for me. I can’t wait to hear where Carpenter goes next musically.
