FOR THOSE I LOVE - For Those I Love

All debut albums have interesting backstories, but the story behind the self-titled debut of For Those I Love – the moniker of Dublin singer-songwriter and producer David Balfe – is truly harrowing. Recording was underway when Paul Curran, his best friend, a poet and fellow member of the Irish punk collective Burnt Out, took his own life. Mired in anguish, anger and bewilderment, "For Those I Love" is the second album in 18 months to grapple with Curran's death. Fellow Dubliners Murder Capital had already stated that every single song on "When I Have Fears" was in some way tied to his death, with the album's title itself referencing a famous Elizabethan sonnet by the great John Keats, poor Curran's favourite. While Murder Capital choose to frame their world in icy post-punk, Balfe's inspiration is a kind of bedroom-dance, infiltrated by biting spoken word.

An echo surfaces in his delivery, almost a sharp-edged chant drawing strength from the wave of vitality that Dublin's post-punk bands have recently been showing (Murder Capital, Fontaines D.C.), though Balfe shares his method more closely with the narrative blueprint of English rapper Mike Skinner (The Streets), bringing to light seemingly banal details like his hidden fascination with the lives of drunks, fools and eccentrics, sharpening their tone with a starker, even nihilistic approach.

Balfe sets Curran's death against a backdrop of the accidents and wounds typical of late adolescence. He never lets the listener underestimate the idea that alcohol abuse and drug-taking are a fleeting, temporary escape, and he never fails to highlight the reasons they're sought out as total evasion from pain, all while remembering that the record actually began as an ode to friendship before being reshaped during its making into a tragic, ominous cloud.

The opening track, "I Have A Love", breaks the Brechtian fourth wall to disorienting effect; a touching, direct dedication in which Balfe imagines listening to this very song in the car at night, with his dear friend sitting smiling beside him. "Birthday" is a bleak depiction of something Balfe experienced firsthand, when as a child he came across the body of a murder victim on his estate, while "The Pain" and "Top Scheme" vaguely recall the hip-hop of Plan B in how their rage is vented with raw, lashing force.

At times the sound leans towards the unsettling post-Dubstep of Burial, not least in the album's emotional nadir, "The Myth/I Don't", a scattered assemblage of echoing screams over which Balfe describes something that suspiciously resembles a nervous breakdown. The track holds one of the album's key moments, when the lyrical darkness is set against strangely euphoric music, steeped in old-school hardcore spirit.

Stripped of words, the shimmering electronics of "To Have You", built on sped-up samples of Bread's "Everything I Own", would work perfectly as peak-time dancefloor material. Likewise, in "You Stayed/To Live", however much it strives to depict squalid circumstances recalling old scrapes and petty vandalism in light of Curran's death, it's still entirely possible to picture a crowd going blissfully wild, cocktail in hand, with a trance anthem playing in the background.

Stitched together with muffled fragments of phone conversations, the record closes on the note of hope offered by "Leave Me Not Alone", where the Irish singer-songwriter reminds us that only the people who truly love you can help pull you back from the existential abyss.

The resolute tone strikes right at the heart, even in a musical landscape overflowing with confessional singer-songwriters spilling their guts cathartically through their own stories.

Even with its many references to the social struggles of Dublin's cultural underbelly – already well captured by his more famous fellow citizens Fontaines D.C. – there's a universality of emotion in Balfe's message; the finely crafted music is skilfully arranged to soften the anguished subject matter of the lyrics, confirming beyond doubt the validity of the label many have already given him: a sharp poet of Irish pain.

"For Those I Love" is an extraordinarily authoritative, raw, passionate celebratory work dedicated to a lost friend; an exorcism of grief carried out on a dancefloor, an unlikely setting in which Balfe proves it's possible to handle themes like death, confusion and despair with hope and notes from clubland.

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29/03/2021

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Cristiano Orlando, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition