For Those I Love

For Those I Love

With a pain at times so real that it can almost be touched, its smartest trick is turning it into something approaching euphoria with its mix of poetry and exhilarating dance beats.

For Those I Love is as much a piece of history as it is a work of art ... A staggering album.

David Balfe melds lively, often beautiful dance music and starkly personal spoken word on this powerful record.

Balfe throws himself into these songs wholeheartedly, teeth gritted as he runs the gamut of anger, pain, nostalgia and sadness. As a result, he has made not only a powerful record but a potentially important one.

Balfe’s wounded outpourings are all too seldom heard from male voices across society, and for that reason, this is an album that will rightly be remembered for years to come.

Balfe couldn’t have expected that his album would land in a year where all too many people around the world are trying to pick themselves up after unexpected loss, but it’s a record of great solidarity, proving that memory is so much more than headstones and regrets over things that weren’t said.

Each track is unique and there’s not a bad song here. Conversations between mates, exclamations about the demise of punk and unique beats wind themselves around the listener’s mind until it is completely claimed, fertile ground for an outpouring of pain and love and the unfairness and bittersweetness of history

It’s a story of survival, a project remarkable in its completeness. ‘For Those I Love’ is a truly exquisite achievement in which the redemptive hope that love and friendship provide is never allowed to sink beneath the waters.

Like Dublin's answer to Mike Skinner or Burial, Dave Balfe relentlessly intones stories and reflections of urban life against akaleidoscopic and sometimes claustrophobic electro background, speckled with found sounds and home recordings.

Haunted and intimate, Balfe’s deep brogue ultimately salvages hope from the wreckage.

His creation of such an overt sense of nostalgia, grief, loss and mourning, whilst also making time to make statements on social justice issues is impressive.

A eulogy for a dead friend, David Balfe’s stirring debut combines lyrics on class, death and despair with clubland highs and hope.

Grief is a fickle monster, and on For Those I Love, Balfe captures the beast with a visceral clarity.

Anchoring the album with his own painful history and never admitting defeat, Balfe has scripted a exhilarating album that contends with unimaginable loss whilst warmly celebrating persistence.