`Carving the Stone` is the second album from Dublin’s For Those I Love, producer, visual artist and songwriter David Andrew Balfe and it`s a stark and stirring portrait of modern Irish life.
The release opens with title track `Carving The Stone` which would usually equate to expressing cultural identity, documenting history, and conveying spiritual beliefs. Here it`s a stream of consciousness, a harsh and blunt depiction of everyday life witnessed over twinkling electronic keys. There`s a kind of shimmer to `No Quiet` which has a deep vocal resonance on life and mortality and the Irish diaspora with a brief tender Sean nós lament shared at the death.
`No Scheme` is an inner monologue shared of adolescent hedonism compared with adult despondency in urban working class life in housing estates where ambitions are seen as empty, hollow, and ultimately futile. A view of characters from the artist`s life is shared in `The Ox / The Afters`. The Ox, an aged former dock worker and ex-boxer, an alcoholic rover whose lived experiences come from a violent life and an example of how not to live your life. The backing soundtrack mirrors time running out.
`Civic` appears to be a contemplation on the environment the singer grew up in and possibly how it shaped him. There`s a restrained fury to `Mirror` with its rapid pulsing beat and frantic lyrical content which includes an adolescent violent knife crime confrontation. A song which Balfe described as “a retelling of an experience from years ago, a pretty tense look around at the present, and a very genuine attempt at nuance while finding a thread that brings it all together, all while trying to hold the mirror up to myself.”
`This Is Not The Place I Belong` is a kind of reflection on alienation from the surroundings that the singer grew up in, a kind of mantra of the birth, school, work, and death life cycle and trying to rise above this and not being sucked in. A tale of emigration comes with `Of The Sorrows`, stay at home despite the disadvantages. It has at times a melodic ditty along with the voice of an elderly Irishman reflecting on the gravity of abandoning his homeland. Heartbreaking.
The album closes out with `I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved` whose title has a biblical signpost. It`s a personal outpouring and feels almost cathartic, a kind of signpost as to where this artist currently is and what he`s come through, giving us all hope. Segments of Jean Ritchie`s `Black Water` and the Christian hymn `Amazing Grace` are spliced in towards the end of this epic almost spiritual eulogy.
`Carving the Stone` is fairly existential and observational and at appears at times that the artist feels rejected by Dublin but struggles to wrap his head around leaving. It did strike home with me as both my parents were Irish emigrants and my father always wanted to “return home” but never did before he passed in his adopted homeland. It brought to the surface the ongoing internal conflict I have being second generation Irish and not really fitting in or being accepted in either camp. I loved this album which I’d file under uneasy listening but essential.
This release for me, is almost For Those I Love`s, own touching, emotional and poignant self-help manual.
Rating 9/10
