Sabrina Carpenter: Pop’s clown princess

“Hard as it is to believe at this late date, not everyone gets yet that Sabrina Carpenter is up to something a lot more wily than just being a sex goddess,” said Chris Willman in Variety. The 26-year-old pop star just scored her second No. 1 album with Man’s Best Friend, whose cover art shows her on hands and knees, playing dog to a man who’s holding a few locks of her blond hair. But understand: The former Disney teen star is “a comedienne at heart,” and “no other star of songland is nearly so dedicated to getting laughs out of the carnage in the battle of the sexes.” The photo spoofs her own readiness to do more for undeserving guys than they’d do for her, and the dozen songs on her “very winning” new album drive home the theme by routinely mocking men’s inadequacies and her inability to stop lusting after them.

But where last year’s Short n’ Sweet established Carpenter as “one of pop’s queens of quirk,” said Jon Caramanica in The New York Times, this album “has all the hallmarks of a rush job.” Almost every song “feels traceable to a very specific ancestor,” echoing hits by Olivia Newton-John, ABBA, Blondie, and others. And the meter of the lyrics often doesn’t even fit the melodies. Yet Man’s Best Friend is still “a bright, effervescent pop record,” said Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker, and the borrowing Carpenter does fits her approach to music making and modern romance. “I like that she is trying to inject a little messiness into a pop landscape that often feels focus-grouped into oblivion.” Besides, “maybe she’s showing us the sanest way to fall in love.” Namely, “don’t think too much” and “laugh when you can.”