It’s not easy to be a convincing humorist in pop music. By design, lyrics are always meant to be a little quirky but few pop stars have mastered the art of hamming it up quite like Sabrina Carpenter. On Man’s Best Friend, Carpenter is in break-up mode the only way she could be: sad but still horny and altogether self-aware.
Just a year out from her blockbuster breakthrough Short n’ Sweet, the singer’s seventh album was created with a tight crew who had been integral to her previous release: Jack Antonoff, Amy Allen and John Ryan. Together with Carpenter’s innuendo-laden wit at the helm, the album zeroes in on the updated Seventies pastiche that worked so well on her biggest hits. She’s a little bit ABBA and a lotta bit Dolly: the Pennsylvania-native hits a charming Southern twang over swathes of synths, airy guitar riffs, and funky nü-disco beats. Her new songs are united in their grooviness as Carpenter’s heartbreak and disappointment in her male options takes her on a thoroughly modern tour of what dating, embracing, and then flipping the script on the humiliation ritual that is being a woman who dates men.
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From the opening “Oh, boy” on “Manchild,” Carpenter spends the entire album dishing out tough love for her lovers, unrelenting in listing out her grievances. On “Tears,” she only “gets wet at the thought” of him “being a responsible guy.” On both “My Man on Willpower” and “Nobody’s Son,” she’s exhausted by her lover’s selective control. On the former, they’re together but he’s not as touchy and clingy and feral for her as he used to be. On the latter, they’ve broken up and he hasn’t caved on calling her yet.
Carpenter has few peers these days when it comes to turning some of the most uncomfortable or even painful feelings when you’re crying over an ex into giggle-worthy treats. “Never Getting Laid” stands out. The slow burning, sexy song has her wishing the best for her ex — so long as he stays in his house and never looks or touches another woman again. She drinks the pain away on “Go Go Juice,” running through the numbers on her phone over a two-steppin’ beat that belongs in your local honky tonk.
The two standouts on the album are when Carpenter is at her flirtiest and her wit is at its quickest. The funky “When Did You Get Hot?” has her encountering a long time acquaintance who she didn’t remember looking so cute. “You were an ugly kid, but you’re a sexy man,” she comments, in a line that can only work with her winking delivery. “House Tour,” a coulda-been Song of the Summer contender if only it had come out a month earlier, is bold enough to have made 1983 Madonna seethe with jealousy. She’s beckoning a new lover to come see her house because she’s “just so proud of [her] design.” On the chorus she assures “I just want you to come inside/But never enter through the back door.
It may have taken Carpenter six albums to finally find the right formula that works for her as a budding pop diva, but now it’s clear there’s no looking back. If Short n’ Sweet solidified her stardom, Man’s Best Friend plates her status in gold.
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