As blood red light rather ominously floods the Sunday night Gorilla stage, I’m not sure what to expect from a For Those I Love live show. The electronic, almost club-ready sound of the first album gave way to instrumentals that felt more post-punk in nature on recent release Carving The Stone, so will it be restrained or full-throttle? Flowers are affixed to the mic, and what looks like a collection of CCTV cameras peer down from a lamppost-like apparatus to the right of the stage. Then, the boppy hip hop tunes that have soundtracked our waiting time give way to a chorus of traditional Irish bagpipes. A vocal sample of an elderly woman talking begins to play; it’s an extended intro of new album centrepiece ‘Of The Sorrows’. The lights dim. Stark visuals, the kind that have gone hand in hand with the music of this project, begin to play on the backing screen. A visual of a burning house gives way to a title card: ‘Act I: She Used To Tell Me That’. Half-finished pint of Guinness in hand, David Balfe enters the stage.
Balfe’s alert blue eyes stare out from beneath a baseball cap. I wonder how his voice will sound; beyond the lyricism and the production of these songs, so much of this project is about his vocal delivery – the Dublin tones that bristle with emotion and honesty. “Stay here in Ireland, with the chains that bind ya chest” he projects, with the exact clarity we hear on the records. Here we go. It’s as if he’s saying these words for the first time, the urgency increasing with each verse. “These slumlord ideologues are a cartoon, and I’ll watch them eat their legs when they can’t move,” he practically shouts, before, shaking with rage, he screams “and I’ll SMILE through it!” and the pint glass explodes in his hand. Prop or not, it’s a spine-tingling moment. This room is coursing with energy.
The artist is a ball of adrenaline now. Hat discarded, he goes straight from this incredible moment into ‘You Stayed / To Live’. Balfe barrels through the track’s teenage memories, spewing words into the mic. The famous Coolock Reds flag is out, and it is really something to hear that ‘I Have A Love’ refrain live for the first time. He then goes straight into the killer ending bit of ‘Civic’, which for my money is the best bit of the new album. It’s almost a shame that we didn’t have the buildup that makes this payoff so impactful on record, but I understand the need to keep the tempo high. And it is high. Hearing the crunching guitars and percussion on these speakers just confirms what an absolute showstopping moment it is.
The second act is called ‘With This Common Identity That We Share’, and Balfe launches into the relentless ‘No Scheme’. With a handheld camera attached to his mic now, the backing display becomes an ultra close-up of his face in night vision as he charges through the words. The passion is radiating off this man. He’s screaming down the mic, while twiddling the dials on his synth, as the words ‘Saoirse don Phalaistín’ appear behind him. I have never seen such a multimedia show at this venue in my 9 years living in this city and I am agog. We even get some of the video footage from the audio samples featured on the albums. After ‘The Shape Of You’, a key track from the first album, he takes a big gulp of water. I imagine he needs it.
Then he’s mixing tunes and samples and tracks from different albums. I love it when people do this live. It’s a real level of attention to detail that shows that an artist has put effort into not just recreating the songs on record. So we have the sample that closes the new album, intertwined with the lyrics of ‘To Have You’ from the first, over a different beat altogether. And then we switch to the hyper-aggressive ‘Mirror’, which is backed by a drawing of Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill, over the top of the black and white visuals of a burning car and flashing lights, before the word ‘CUNTS’ appears in all caps to accompany the song’s lyric. Wow. I need a breather.
I think Balfe does too, because he sits on the ground for the next act – ‘three stories, three people’ and goes through a couple of monologues called ‘Brendan’ and ‘Aaron’, the latter of which I recognise from the excellent YouTube mixtape he put out around the first album. I’m very pleased to hear it here. And the third of these stories is new album highlight ‘The Ox’, featuring real footage of the boxer of the title. Then suddenly, the final act is already upon us. He’s back to hurrying out words like the end is near on ‘Top Scheme’ which is backed by its incredibly detailed video (I’m pretty sure at one point the name of an author appears on screen with the words ‘READ HER WORK’ which, added to the information overload, has the slight feel of that It’s Always Sunny board meme – but I’m here for it), and then ‘You Live’ and ‘Birthday / The Pain’ bring the set to a close, with a message for anyone experiencing pain to leave a little of it in the room tonight.
Almost without thinking, I’ve typed 900 words to tell you what happened at this show. And that is testament to the thrilling, overwhelming experience of watching it. The For Those I Love project is such an emotional, visceral thing, and it’s easy to see that David Balfe has poured his absolute soul into it. I feel its emotional resonance and I’ve never met the guy. So imagine being in his world. As the flashing lights of his final, flagship song, ‘I Have A Love’, reflect back into the crowd, I notice a guy about 12 feet to my right, tears streaming down his face. And I get it. This is the power of art made flesh. Another guy gets up on stage to hug Balfe, which would normally seem very weird, but kind of feels natural in this context. And it ends on the perfect note, Balfe modifying the outro to play us out with ‘Dear James’, a song he and Paul made in their band days. I cannot stress this enough: see this man live if the opportunity presents itself.
Words by Tom Burrows
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