Album Review: For Those I Love, Carving The Stone

After receiving universal acclaim for his self-titled debut album, Dublin producer and songwriter David Balfe took time to think about what he wanted next from his work. While his first LP was abrasively personal, Carving The Stone casts a wider net, with the artist examining the effects that a broken political system has on Irish working-class communities.

Make no mistake, though, the political is always personal in Balfe’s music, and the nine songs here continue to show his eye for capturing the smallest detail and telling the most compelling stories.

Balfe is one of the few rap-poets who can incisively find the words to match his righteous anger. He often moves so fast that a lot can get lost on first listen. Example: within several seconds on a song like ‘No Scheme’, he devastates with lines like: “When friends I knew never grew/ Wound up lost and abused, neck and noose,” before jumping to the next potent image. Elsewhere in the same song, he describes Dublin as “held together by surveillance and vapes.” No line ever feels throwaway, no rhyme ever feels stuffed in to finish a couplet. Everything hits.

If the lyricism is strong, the production gives this album a pulsating edge, ensuring its razor-sharp polemic stays focused and virulent. Album opener, ‘Carving The Stone’, is made up of big, dramatic synths, while skittery drums serve as the backdrop to ‘No Scheme.’

Then there’s ‘Mirror’, where Balfe raps over an industrial techno rave beat. Never has his anger sounded so caustic as here. He turns his attention to the techno-feudalists and capitalists who’ve gutted his country and sold off its future, all of it climaxing in two bars of him spitting out the words “Cunts, cunts, cunts” like bullets. It’s hard to imagine anyone but him pulling something so raw and unfiltered off.

9/10

Out now