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HomeMusicMean Bacharach: Sacrifice Album Review

Mean Bacharach: Sacrifice Album Review

Shortly after excoriating a list of managers and collaborators he felt had wronged him, LA house producer Seven Davis Jr. retweeted a statement by Azealia Banks, the patron saint of airing out dirty laundry on main. “I’ve actually always been really nice,” Banks dubiously claimed. “Real nice people are very mean. Anyone being nice 24/7 is hiding something.”

It’s in that vinegary spirit that Davis decided to put out Sacrifice, released as Mean Bacharach and just as pugnacious and studio-enamored as his new moniker implies. This music was originally recorded in 2018, when the producer was a support act on Flying Lotus’s 3D-augmented Kuso-era tour. But its themes of self-improvement and score-settling may be truer to Davis’s life now, after years of battling depression and PTSD and struggling to get sober. “Funny it took falling to the depths of rock bottom to finally realize this project deserves to see light,” he said on Bandcamp.

Davis usually makes deep, soulful vocal house, filled with pneumatic percussion, warm ’70s analog textures, and washes of garbled vocals. Here, he leans into abstract sound design, evoking wild auteurs like Shuggie Otis, McCartney II-era Paul or Wizard-era Todd Rundgren, for whom pop was as much about instinct as craft. “No Doubt” emerges from an a capella wasteland of absent-minded dum-dums and bizarre tomcat growls. “Let’s Go To The Circus” sounds like Amerie’s “1 Thing” melted into sewer sludge, while “Blacklist” sounds like it’s being played backwards, likely because it is. The songs are all around two or three minutes except the five-minute title track, which emerges as the album’s anthem despite featuring nothing more than bass, an unchanging drum loop, and Davis’s musings on a less-secure past self he’s happy to leave behind.

Davis’s vitriol extends to childhood rivals (“High School Reunion”), noncommittal partners (“Lazy Lover,” with Brainfeeder producer Mono/Poly), and fame-chasing solipsists (“15 Minutes”). But his contempt feels purposeful rather than recklessly cruel, as if he’s decided to cut out all the people he doesn’t need from his life and acknowledged that a little ruthlessness is healthy during such a transition. “High School Reunion” ends with Davis admitting his grudges are pointless and he might actually benefit more from trying to relate to his former tormentor than trying to punish him. Switch the sexes on “Lazy Lover” and you’d have “No Scrubs.”

The castigation of self-aggrandizing artists on “15 Minutes” comes with the subtext that being famous would suck, because you wouldn’t be able to put out an album like Sacrifice without pissing people off. “A lot of [y’all] slept on my Mean Bacharach alias side project,” Davis tweeted; “you were supposed to.” The true mark of success, Sacrifice slyly implies, isn’t fame or fortune but having the option to release an album like this: ripe, uncompromising, and too grown-up to give a shit if the average listener likes it or not. Like a lot of pickled things, it’s an acquired taste.


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