Man’s Best Friend

the take

When "Manchild" was released as the first single for this album, a part of me already felt how underwhelming "Man's Best Friend" by Sabrina Carpenter would be for me. The lead single didn't really click for me like "Espresso" did, which led me to not anticipate this as much. Fast forward to about two weeks after initial release and I finally managed to give this one a chance, to hopefully be proven wrong. And honestly? It's not terrible, but my intuition was still correct by a slightly wide margin, though. It's kind of hard to not look at this as a side B to "Short n' Sweet", given that "Man's Best Friend" was released almost a year to the day. But still, it feels like Sabrina stuck to the ideology that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". And honestly, that logic has yielded some mixed results overall, but still can work if executed properly. This isn't one of those properly executed times, though. Unlike many others, I truly couldn't care less about how horny she comes off as in her music. It makes her stand out from the rest easily, plus it makes her sound more confident about herself, which is a plus. The problem with that is by this time around, the clever innuendos were few and far between. Either they came off more direct than before or something like that because I was completely indifferent toward said lyrics. That's a minor issue, so maybe the actual music on here can make up for that, right? Eh... the production on here as a whole is underwhelming as well. Like I said earlier, "Manchild" didn't captivate enough interest for me, and the rest of the album is more of the same. Save for "House Tour" and "Tears", there really aren't any interesting sounds on here to keep me consistently interested. I mean, sure, the outcomes of songs like "When Did You Get Hot?" and "Don't Worry I'll Make You Worry" are fine, but are among the few that had potential to be better. Maybe my expectations were high even before the thought of "Man's Best Friend" even existed.