The opening track of For Those I Love – Irish artist David Balfe’s first under this moniker – sets out the album’s thesis in resolute style. Balfe breaks the fourth wall of I Have A Love to tell the story of playing the song to fellow artist and best friend Paul Curran, whose passing meant he would not see the project’s realisation. The loss of Curran serves as the heart wrenching crux of the record. “I have a love, and it never fades” is Balfe’s refrain throughout both the opener and the album as a whole - an unflinching examination of grief, anger, and ultimately hope.
Across the album’s nine track run time, Balfe expertly weaves enigmatic club beats and samples around his spoken word delivery, exploring heaviest of subject matters and resulting in an almost primal sense of catharsis. His soul is laid bare on Top Scheme as he rallies against a cruel, uncaring world that allows its most vulnerable members to slip through its cracks. For Those I Love is a masterclass in storytelling and motif, with interspersed voice notes and audio snippets giving the album the warm but weighty nostalgia of a being in the smoking section of a club. Grief is amongst the most complex of emotions, and this album is an attempt to parse that, to fight against the pain of loss.
The viscerally uncomfortable The Myth/I Don’t represents the emotional nadir of the album, but also serves as something of a turning point of the piece. Grief has the ability to take tiny details of a memory and repackage them in mesmerisingly aching ways. As we go into the album’s mid-point The Shape Of You Balfe recounts waking up in a Belgian hospital after suffering a broken leg, only to be snapped out of his state of fear by the sight of the arriving Curran and friends. He recounts Curran’s words of "Stories to tell never breed sadness, they treat it, and if you can grasp it, own it, deal with it, you can heal with it, so I'll heal with it". Something shifts in the mind of the listener thereafter, with slivers of light managing to appear there was once only darkness.
Far from hagiography, Balfe’s words offer an unrelentingly candid depiction of a young man traversing feelings of loss. His lyrics are intimate and often uncomfortable, and the record is all the more beautiful for it. The album’s production fizzes with a composure of execution and an assuredness of genre that calls to mind early-era The Streets and Burial - in time, For Those I Love will prove to be every bit as epoch defining.
On You Live/No One Like You, the album’s themes of hope are brought to the fore. An ode to finding kinship in an unrelenting world - Balfe tears through a list of peers, pals, musical icons and footballing heroes from his beloved Shelbourne FC. Few albums will make you feel like you are part of something so simultaneously intimate and vast. For Those I Love is a triumph of the absolution friendship and hope can provide in the face of loss.
Final track Leave Me Not Love is a cacophony of repeated motifs, snippets of lyrics and samples, and Curran’s poems. We end excerpt from Jackson C Frank’s Cryin’ Like A Baby – a song close to the hearts of Balfe and Curran. The closing track acts not as a full stop, but an ellipsis. These stories won’t fade, and so neither will the memories of moments shared, and so neither will the love.
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