The Cope: Dancer – A modern melding of 1990s dance and French house

The Dublin-Berlin-based duo of David Anthony Curley and Joe Furlong hope to “make people dance” with their debut album, viewing the project as a marrying of such shared influences as 1990s dance classics and French house. The record places movement as a central theme: movement of body, movement of feelings, movement of genres and movement of tempo.

The opening track, I Am Stretched on Your Grave, takes the 17th-century poem towards a pumping club anthem, which perhaps undercuts rather than underscores its meaning. True Romance is tonally quite similar: melancholic, with sombre piano drawing out a catchy romantic composition about “love, isolation and control”.

The idea of anthems is baked into Dancer’s DNA, from the driving End of Time to Find Another Way, with its “desire for connection”. Back on my Bullshit, with its slightly scuzzier identity, brings to mind Miss Kittin, but more generally it feels as if they are trying to reach towards artists like The Blaze and Jungle.

There is a leavening lightness to Lonely Louder, with its R&B vocal, matching Oíche and its ambient M83-influenced reflectiveness. Solas Solace mines an interplay between washed out and up-tempo, while the spirit of electroclash emerges on Revolution 636. Forever Me has one of the album’s nicest vocal performances; with its natural looseness, it conveys a playfulness that could be a thread worth pulling.