Sabrina Carpenter brings spark and sarcasm to LA: Concert review

On By Littum

Just past the halfway mark of her first of three Los Angeles shows last night, Sabrina Carpenter flashed a Colgate smile as she arrived for tonight’s roulette moment, where she spins a bottle to decide which song to cover. “Do you guys like to play games here?” she said. Recent selections on other dates on her “Short n’ Sweet” tour have been Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” and Madonna’s “Material Girl.” “How about a little Christina?”

On cue, Christina Aguilera rose from the back of the stage and duetted with Carpenter on her hits “Ain’t No Other Man” and “What a Girl Wants,” the latter of which they just released as a collaboration on Spotify on the 25th anniversary for Aguilera’s self-titled debut. Vocal runs flew, awkward glances were shared, and decibels peaked with an arena-sized wave of teenage squeals.

It was a co-sign that made sense for Carpenter, who has been on a rocket ride to modern pop royalty over the past two years. Like Aguilera, Carpenter has embraced high-five ideals matched with deliberately sly, often not-so-coded pop (remember “Candyman?”). That ethos permeated Carpenter’s tight, fine point show: a musician in full control of his artistry, grappling with the jagged edges of romance, from lust and love to heartbreak and regret.

At the Crypto.com Arena, there were peaks and valleys of mood and texture across Carpenter’s 90-minute set, staged like a 1970s variety show, subtitles on the adjacent screen reading: “Recorded in front of a live studio audience.” The set list consisted largely of songs from her 2022 breakthrough album “E-Mails I Can’t Send” and her recently released sixth album “Short n’ Sweet”, the one that cemented her as one of this generation’s foremost pop stars (and precisely earned her six Grammy nominations, including Best New Artist about a decade after her debut).

Unlike fellow pop royalty du jour Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, Carpenter doesn’t deal in bombast, at least not musically. The mood was jubilant yet subdued throughout the show, where she immediately strutted around the stage hitting choreography with a crew of backup dancers to “Feather” and soon sat down on a toilet in a makeshift bathroom to sing “Sharpest Tool “.

Carpenter centered it all with performative fluidity, making it all look easy and, above all, fun. Part of the appeal is that Carpenter doesn’t seem to take his newfound stature (or himself, really) too seriously. She doesn’t just tell the joke – she was in on it long before the world was too. One of her greatest assets is her sense of humor, and there’s an air of light-hearted sarcasm that permeates every beat. But it’s her professionalism that brings it all into focus, even when it seems off-script, whether it’s taking a picture midway through “Slim Pickins” or when the sound cuts out at the end of “Nonsense” just before she would historically deliver a custom-made verse that fans meticulously documented when she opened on Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour. (“Technical difficulties,” the monitors next to her explain.)

Carpenter knows what it means to be in showbiz — she starred in Disney’s “Girl Meets World” from 2014 to 2017 — but she acts like she’s enjoying it more than ever. She roused the crowd during “Short n’ Sweet” standout “Coincidence,” a campfire song in the style of ’70s Fleetwood Mac, and dazzled when she played back her own reflection while singing “Taste.” Aside from Aguilera, she deviated from the script here and there, handing a pair of the same “fuzzy pink handcuffs” she sings about in “Juno” to actress Rachel Sennott, who was standing in the front row.

But for Carpenter, her Los Angeles show was more than just another stop on her tour, which ends at the Kia Forum on Monday before heading over to Europe in March 2025. It was also a homecoming, she explained, as she has long considered the city’s one. of her dwellings. “I spent so many years dreaming so much and thinking about things and being creative,” she said, “just spending so much time investing in creativity and things that make me happy and things that I love and things , that fills me with joy and maybe filled others with joy. And now I get to sit here in a sold-out Crypto arena because of you.”

To reach this point after years of starts and stops, “Espresso,” her closing track, made for a fitting coda. “Espresso” is the one that launched her into the pop stratosphere, a song she first performed during a set at Coachella in April that itself felt like a revelation. But even then the sparkles of the evening did not sparkle. “Thank you for coming on my tour. I love to sing. I hope you enjoyed hearing me sing for so long,” she said in a series of farewell video vignettes. “Thank you for coming to the show! Hope you had a good evening… Was that sincere?”