Album Review: Man's Best Friend by Sabrina Carpenter

If Short n' Sweet gave her a blockbuster single in "Please Please Please", Man's Best Friend uses it as a blueprint - Jack Antonoff's quirky gleam, the cheeky sting of Carpenter's punch lines - and scales it into a full aesthetic replete with even more grandiose gestures and layers of innuendo. It's the closest Carpenter has come to a signature set, a clean arc from emails i can't send's diaristic candour, through Short n' Sweet's genre-hopping, zippy provocation, to a record that radiates a confidence unmatched by any other pop album this year. Production-wise, Man's Best Friend is deceptively dense.

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A clear step in the right direction, but still not reaching her full potential. Sometimes I wish that modern pop music wasn't so juvenile. Upbeat production and astounding vocal melodies can, more often than not, be ruined by mindless lyrics and an overall sense of the music itself being for 16 year old girls. Sabrina Carpenter started as a Disney Channel girl, and like loads of others, has propelled herself into international superstardom.

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Sabrina Carpenter's seventh album, Man's Best Friend is a musically adventurous record, which pushes her into stranger and more ambitious territory than ever. It pulls from retro pop, soft rock, disco and synth textures - one song features a straightforward ABBA callback. Sometimes it swells into huge cinematic arrangements, other times stripping things right back so that Carpenter's Dolly Parton-like vocals sit over spindly percussion.

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Carpenter's charisma is not up for debate, especially once you've seen her live. Her stage presence is electric, a playful pin-up personality who pushes boundaries in ways this record can't quite match. On Man's Best Friend, that magnetism is present, but filtered and thinned out. Authenticity is not the issue here; Carpenter sounds like herself.

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Once upon a time, primarily in the pre-raunch ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, there was a genre of film popularly known as the sex comedy, in which adult relationships (and what we now might call situationships) were mined for faintly risque but reasonably sophisticated laughs and maybe even a slight bit of actual insight. It’s anyone’s guess whether Sabrina Carpenter has seen a lot of those movies in the course of absorbing all the old-school show biz that informs her public persona, but boy, does she know sex comedy. No other star of the screen or songland is nearly so dedicated to getting laughs out of the carnage in the battle of the sexes, as she does to an even further degree in her very winning new album, “Man’s Best Friend.

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Pop superstardom, it turns out, did absolutely nothing to improve Sabrina Carpenter's love life. That's the thrust of the singer's shrewd and tangy "Man's Best Friend," which dropped Thursday night, just a year after last summer's chart-topping "Short n' Sweet." The earlier album, which spun off a pair of smash singles in "Espresso" and "Please Please Please," went on to be certified triple platinum and to win two Grammy Awards -- more than enough to transform Carpenter, now 26, from a former Disney kid into the latest (and horniest) member of pop's A-list. Yet all that success seems only to have attracted more of the losers she sang about last time.

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A pint-sized pop colossus, Sabrina Carpenter's decade long rise afforded her time to perfect a deliciously saucy elixir. A kind of post-post-modern pin-up, she's equal parts Gen Z dream girl and the kind of woman who got themselves painted on the sides of American bomber planes during the Second World War. Both vintage and thoroughly (post) modern, Sabrina's double viral whammy 'Espresso' and 'Please, Please, Please' transcended the lines of demarcation that bind modern pop - she's adored by the teen in their bedroom, and the father flicking through TV channels.

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In a recent episode of the Are You a Charlotte? podcast, famed Sex and the City columnist Candace Bushnell claimed that Gen Z isn't having as much sex as previous generations. She and countless others have lamented that today's youth have developed views about sex that are, if not puritanical, alarmingly regressive. To wit: When pop singer Sabrina Carpenter revealed the title and cover art for her seventh studio album, Man's Best Friend, TikTok and the app formerly known as Twitter lit up with outrage over the image of the 26-year-old on her bare knees at the foot of a man gripping a fistful of her blond hair.

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