video review: 'singular: act ii' by sabrina carpenter

Ehhh... look, it was a quick one to knock off my list, happy I got it done.

Next up, something I'm actually more interested in dissecting - stay tuned!

album review: 'singular: act ii' by sabrina carpenter

Alright, round two, shall we?

Now for those of you unawares, this will be my second time covering a Sabrina Carpenter project, as I reviewed Act I of this series last year - and to my mild surprise, got a fair amount of traffic - and backlash - for it. And while some of this might be rooted in me just having heard too much of this style of pop before - not helped by being stuck on Hollywood Records where this sound has been utterly recycled and poorly produced time and time again - there were still blatant parallels to mainstream acts that Carpenter was mimicking, and not particularly well. And like with most vanity projects - which especially if you considered the content of the last project it felt like it was - it was made to serve the fanbase and nobody else, but I had to think she could try a little harder for some originality than this!

But hey, apparently she's still putting out projects with this being part two, and folks kept on requesting it even despite the last review, and it is short enough to make for a quick review while I crunch through meatier projects, so what did we get Singular: Act II?

video review: 'singular: act i' by sabrina carpenter

So this is one of those projects where I expected backlash for the review... but I'll admit to still being surprised by it. I mean, seriously folks, you're defending this? There's so little personality and character... eh, whatever, you can have it.

Next up, we've got a (mostly) miserable Billboard BREAKDOWN, and then... well, we'll see. Stay tuned!

album review: 'singular: act i' by sabrina carpenter

So this is the sort of review I would normally consign to the Trailing Edge, except in this case I made a deal with the patron who requested it to swap this for that bloated Zayn album no music critic wants to touch - it's at least shorter, I'll give it that. And you know what, as much as it would be very easy for me to pass albums in this lane off as just another vanity project for an actress in between movies or TV pilots, but I've been surprised in this lane before - go back to Lucy Hale's Road Between, a pop-country debut that came right the hell out of nowhere and wound up as one of the best in its subgenre this decade!

And then I noticed Sabrina Carpenter's label... and then listened to her two previous albums... and consequently got a distinctive sinking feeling. Yeah folks, you all might know Sabrina Carpenter as once having one of the starring roles in Girl Meets World, but her music which has taken up a surprising amount of her schedule is exactly what you'd expect coming out of Hollywood Records: the sort of sterile, underwritten, badly produced pop pablum you'll hear chasing the trends and barely having any distinctive identity. I'm normally inclined to just call these vanity projects, but Sabrina Carpenter seems to have placed a lot of stock in these albums, along with a lot of her own writing credits... probably not a good thing, because the production is mediocre and trend-chasing at best and I wasn't impressed by her vocals or her songwriting. That said... look, it's twenty five minutes, it's eight songs, it can't be that bad, right?