In the spring of 2021 David Balfe – recording as For Those I Love – released his eponymous debut album. Born and raised in a working class suburb of Dublin, on it Balfe had crafted songs which were in part a requiem for his lost friend Paul Curran but that were beautiful and uplifting, mixing the ecstatic comedowns of The Streets‘ early work with found sounds and prized recordings of their innocently made conversations in life.
Curran had become a mainstay in the city and beyond’s spoken word circuit, one in which Stephen James Smith has also featured prominently. His CV is impressive; In 2017 he was commissioned by St. Patrick’s Festival to a celebratory narrative of Ireland and the resultant piece, ‘My Ireland‘ was presented with a film by Director Myles O’Reilly and screened at the London Film Festival, whilst other gigs have included the Electric Picnic, Other Voices, the Oscar Wilde Awards in LA and Glastonbury.
See No Evil is his first album of poetry set to music, similar conceptually – but not the same – as Balfe’s project. Recorded during lockdown whilst Smith was living in rural County Wexford, it’s a collaboration with composer Gareth Quinn Redmond and features a stellar cast of collaborators including Conor O’Brien (Villagers), Jess Kav, Laura Quirke (Lemoncello), Cormac Begley and Camin Gilmore (Sun Collective / Crash Ensemble).
The two textures – the rough phrasing of words, pitched against a range of ambient drones and more traditional instrumentation are glove-like and symbiotic throughout. Smith’s mind through verse muses on loneliness and remorse (opener No Other Words), whilst I’ve Had Lovers refuses the two dimensional fictions of a relationship one step removed, Saintly Sister the parent’s loss of a child born only in imagination. It’s The Garden however that has huge poignancy, setting out the uncomplicated, absolute bonds of motherhood and son, ties which grip like flowers do to soil and sky, but that also prompt feelings both savage and unpredictable.
But as well as about the self, Smith also looks at Ireland and especially Dublin through a lense which embraces warily it’s changing character and landscape. Here an accordion warbles to An Ode To Tony McMahon’s Den, as old and new people and skyline grain swap places, whilst the epic seven minutes of Dublin You Are convey a man’s love for all it’s ghosts, an identity which will never be complete and the unwritten contract of hope it needs to honour for everyone who calls it home.
In abstract Smith sums up the idea of See No Evil almost fatalistically. ‘In some ways I care how this is received, what we’ve done means a lot to me, but in others I couldn’t care less, we did what we set out to do and now it’s up to the album to find it’s way in the world’. Like David Balfe and a million other storytellers in whose footsteps they both walk, he understands loving something and setting it free are never quite the same thing.
See No Evil is out now on Nymphs And Thugs.
The Voice Of Unreason 