For Those I Love – Carving The Stone review

Something good can often be something you wear like a tattoo. Even if it’s what you’re remembered for, after it fades the outline is still there, the original meaning forgotten but an image woken up with every day.

Grieving at the loss of his lifelong friend Paul Curran, as For Those I Love David Balfe channelled his intensity of feeling into one of the most transfixing records of the decade so far. Even though as the Dubliner was collecting all the awards he knew though he’d never be able to revisit any of the same ground creatively for fear of retraumatizing himself, making the process of a follow up maze like and in the beginning impenetrable.

Carving The Stone instead looks both inward and outward, musing about a city in which existence is only possible via wage slavery and cultural erosion which at the extremes homogenizes being Irish into a meme. These feelings push him into conflict with himself on This Is Not A Place I Belong and of The Sorrows, whilst the title track’s glistery rave is at odds with it’s poetic darkness.

Balfe also reveals himself as a story teller of some gravity and humour on The Ox/The Afters (About a character with an “Alex Higgins sway”), but it’s the epic closer I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved which threads the contrasting emotions together into some kind of whole. We all have to wear things, it’s how we do it that matters.

You can read a full review here.