Sabrina Carpenter - Short n' Sweet (August 23, 2024) Album • Page 9

Katy Perry's One of the boys had personality imo. But I unironically adore that album and will die on that hill

 

Teenage Dream had a lot of personality too. Felt like it was all lost once she became more of a brand than anything. The larger point is that I’m saying is that Sabrina has a lot of personality and charisma that comes through on here and I think it hits that disco and folk vibe that Katy used to do, but I think does it better.

 

Tornado warnings and fast times are still my top 2 Sabrina songs now that this is out, but I’ve only listened twice and espresso might supplant them both.

edit: that was supposed to be a response to an earlier part of the thread but I see it’s moved on quite a bit

fwiw I thought Katy Perry’s Smile had some great songs on it.

 

Just dove in to this after her Outside Lands performance, which I quite liked. It’s definitely not as good but you’ll find some songs to enjoy. The singles are well done and I am into “Tornado Warnings”.

 

My takeaway after three listens is that it is not a coincidence that the three biggest new pop starlets of the decade — Olivia, Sabrina, Chappell — are all funny as hell and have unique lyrical personalities.

 

Didn’t expect to see everyone adoring this! I liked her last album well enough. Slim Pickins is absolutely the standout. I think some of my issue is that I’ve gotten tired of Julia Michaels’ style

 

Oh no does meerkat have me blocked

 

I wasn’t sure that officially aligning with you was in my best interests

 

Smart

 

it’s best to do the opposite of Josh

 

These tracks sound like the best collection of songs her team could assemble, and some of them slap but there’s literally nothing here that creates a through line for the record, truly sounds like a random collection of tracks.

Her lyrics are the standout but you can absolutely feel the pre-constructed melodies/choruses. It almost feels like these were fully formed songs upon her recording them and she added in the verses.

 

What do you mean by pre-constructed? Aren't a lot of pop songs collaborations between the singer-songwriter and producer?

There are a lot of things going on here musically but I feel like her lyrics absolutely create a through line.

 

Musically its def scattershot…and the tracks just seem to be rather bland. A lot of the hooks and melodies on here feel veryyyy similar to stuff they write for other artists (Julia needs to clock out).

none of it stands out, I think they could’ve done a better job giving her more interesting material.

 

Sometimes I don’t understand why people say something sounds like a scattershot, or all over the place, and other times say an album is varied or “covers a lot of ground”. Seems like on the new Childish Gambino people mentioned it as a feature, where here it seems to be perceived as a bug. I think varied is the right term, but you might just not like her take on different sounds.

 

The throughline is she’s both incredibly heartbroken and horny.

 

Increasingly, I feel like people say this when it’s something as simple as an album having both bangers AND ballads.

 

The shouted delivery on "We like to mistake butterflies for cardiac arrest!" on "Lie to Girls" is so Bleachers that I could have told you Jack co-wrote that song even if I only heard that five-second snippet.

 

let her cook

 

I can only speak for myself, but I think it's a contextual thing. Sometimes that kind of genre-switching is baked into a project (or an artist's persona), and that is slated to be Gambino's last album, so I think people enjoyed hearing all sides of him. I don't NOT enjoy hearing her swap out different styles here, I just think it feels a little less cohesive as a 35-minute pop album, if that makes any sense.

 

But like, what on here isn’t “pop”? I don’t think the country-leaning stuff is really at odds with the R&B leaning stuff or the ‘80s pop leaning stuff. It all feels like different speeds on the bike, but definitely not any kind of jarring stylistic shift.

 

yeah honestly the only song on here that doesn't feel in line sonically with the others is espresso, which makes sense when you need to pump a single out

 

I don’t know if it’s the Spotify playlist generation or what, but I feel like we’ve gotten worse at accepting that albums can, do, should, and always have had ups and downs and ebbs and flows. I feel like I see a lot of it with female pop stars especially. Olivia and Chappell are good examples, where everyone seems to want albums that are just the bangers and not the ballads. But then we get a super one-note album like the second disc of Tortured Poets and most of us realize we don’t want that, either?

 

I agree with that, altho I think Olivia is just bad at ballads and good at bangers