“Where’s the pride in this city? I won’t survive in this city,” For Those I Love – aka David Balfe – spits despondently in ‘This Is Not The Place I Belong’. Throughout the Dublin poet-producer’s new album ‘Carving The Stone’, he is trapped between those two states of mind: his love of home paralyses his impulse to leave, while the problems he observes – crime, skyrocketing rents, boredom – make a future there just as unthinkable. His clear-eyed spoken-word and stylish beatmaking, both sharpened since his 2021 eponymous debut, combine for a brutal, complex study of his city.
The key to the album’s brilliance is Balfe’s darting between small, succinct portraits, from barflies to beatings: “Smashed in the head outside a creche with his son in his hands,” lies one civilian in the title track, “left with a phone in his pocket with two calls from his Mam.” This jumping around conjures up striking parallels, like that between everyday violence and the decimation of working-class communities under capitalism: “If I’m going to bleed, then make me bleed with a blade that I can see,” he snaps in ‘Mirror’.
Giving equal weighting to happier vignettes – “My grandfather, Sunday morning, tea in the pot and the fry is on,” he recalls in ‘This Is Not The Place I Belong’ – forces his mixed feelings about Dublin into competition. He focuses that dissonance in ‘Of The Sorrows’, shifting between images of debris and rowan trees up to the closing refrain: “I’ll never leave / I have to leave.”
The steadiness of Balfe’s thick-accented delivery balances these perspectives, and maintains the realism of ‘Carving The Stone’. His temper can flare – “cunts!” he barks 14 times in a row on ‘Mirror’ – but he never becomes uncontrolled or theatrical. His voice stays in roughly the same conversational register, even when it swells furiously or shrinks hopelessly. When Balfe’s rising tone suddenly drops to a dejected mutter towards the end of ‘No Scheme’, it is the sound of anger hardening into resentment.
Around his muted delivery though, ‘Carving The Stone’’s musical arrangements fizz with life – Balfe’s production proves to be as complex as his lyrics. Held together by a few mainstays – piano melodies, warped drumkits, and burbling synths – the music shapeshifts from ‘No Quiet’’s mid-tempo bass groove to the thumping techno of ‘Mirror’. He achieves a sense of place throughout, as in ‘No Quiet’’s sampling of traditional Irish folk singer Neilí Ní Dhomhnaill or the folk-dance violin on ‘Of The Sorrows’.
There is a happy ending in ‘I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved’, when Balfe declares: “I am proud of my own life.” ‘Carving The Stone’ feels life-affirming even at its darkest, thanks to Balfe’s charged emotions about the city and the vitality he gives it. While he describes modern Dublin as a world of compromises, lamenting “the trades I’ve made just to stay where I’m from” on ‘No Scheme’, he presents that world with real clarity and heart: Balfe never seems willing to give up on it.
