Louise Burns

According to Louise Burns, the spirit animal hovering above her new album is a Foxx. A John Foxx, to be precise, meaning the impressively cheekboned UK synth pop pioneer who fronted Ultravox in the late ‘70s. You can find a picture of Burns online, standing in a record store, the proud new owner of Foxx’s second solo LP, The Garden. Fittingly, Burns’ sophomore album is partly located in the same time and place. “I went back to the music I first fell in love with,” she says of her latest, The Midnight Mass. “Which was the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Depeche Mode, all of my favourite influences.” You could add Berlin-era Bowie into the mix—there’s even a tense, Scott Walker-ish track called “The Lodger”—but The Midnight Mass is hardly an exercise in aping Burns’ heroes. She’s too much in the habit of being herself to let that happen. And so, while the glacial presence of NY no-wavers Suicide is felt in a track like “Don’t Like Sunny Days,” it’s in a sort of détente with Burns’ natural warmth, amber voice, and her instinct for a hook. And while Townes Van Zandt was a seemingly unlikely source for the slow-burning “Heaven”— “I w... more...