The pop superstar’s new LP extends the sound and the attitude of last year’s smash „Short n‘ Sweet.“
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. Here she’s dealing with a smooth talker doling out empty promises, a crybaby who can’t decide what he wants, even a guy so fixated on self-betterment that he’s lost interest in the bedroom.
“He’s busy, he’s working, he doesn’t have time for me,” she trills exasperatedly in “My Man on Willpower,” “My slutty pajamas not tempting him in the least.”
It’s a veritable gallery of rogues, this LP, not least the dude in the dark suit pictured on the cover of “Man’s Best Friend” with a hank of Carpenter’s blond hair in his fist as she kneels before him. The image inspired an instant controversy when she unveiled it in June, with critics accusing her of propping up dangerous ideas about the submission of women in the age of the tradwife.
