Image via YouTube
We’re in an 80s revival, baby, and Louise Burns‘ melodic, acoustic goth rock a la The Cure is proof of that. Burns draws from the melody-within-melancholy of her influences to produce a catchy, anxious post-punk sound of her own. It’s a heritage of angst that Burns embraces fully for her Siouxsie Sioux makeup-heavy 16mm video for “Who’s the Madman,” the opening song of her aptly-titled album Young Mopes.
Burns appears as a red-lipped vampire who feasts not on blood, but on watching absurd scenes from a TV-like portal, bemoaning “you’ve spent your life chasing after a ghost.” Despair binge-watching has never looked as good as it does in Burns’ pink and blue neon-lit bachelor coffin. It’s telling of our own escapism into YouTube and Netflix wormhole banality to avoid mortal worries like Does my life suck? Will I find The One? Can I afford a tight coffin apartment in this economy? Burns explains more in a statement:
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“‘Who’s the Madman’ is a song written about confronting the possibility of failure after spending a lifetime chasing a dream, so naturally, the video has absolutely nothing to do with that. Instead, I play a lethargic, TV-addicted Dracula who follows a ghost/”dreamhopper” out of my home into a world much more bizarre, surreal and welcoming than the one seen on TV.
It was directed by Exquisite Corpse and shot on 16mm film, so I had to really learn how to act for sheer economy of what little film we had to work with. It was possibly the most fun I’ve had on set, so much that I lost my voice for two days from laughing at the total absurdity of everything.”
Watch the video below:
Jill Krajewski is absolutely a vampire. Follow her on Twitter.
