LA indie rock band and dark arts purveyors Holy Wars have once again broken the monotony of the pandemic with a visually stunning video for their thirst-quenching cover of 1980s hit “Tainted Love.”
The unofficial anthem of the second British Invasion is given a distinctly modern sound signature by Holy Wars, replacing the bounciness of the Soft Cell’s 1981 version with a more eerily pounding and defiant arrangement. Performed by Kat Leon and guitarist Nick Perez and produced by Nocturn (Alex Shenkman), the cover gives the song a single narrator and reimagines its iconic elements as a struggle to stay grounded against a mysterious insurgency of cloaked lust and taboo.
The accompanying video, staring multidisciplinary dancer Clinton Kyles, directed by Diego Vicentini and filmed by cinematographer Horacio Martinez at Schecter Guitar Research in LA, soaks the track in visceral sexual tension and takes the song’s most soaring moment — the chorus lyric “take my tears and that’s not nearly all” — and pushes it over the precipice, falling in place of flying while’s Leon trials off seconds before disappearing into an abyss.
More than 40 years after the track ‘synth-ploded’ into American boomboxes — it was originally written by Ed Cobb for singer Gloria Jones in 1964 and then popularized by Soft Cell in 1981 spending 43 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 — the Holy War’s cover is a genuflection to the legacy of the British dance hall banger and its waltz with unpure love.
