The rhythm is familiar, the tones are chilling, and the melody is strangely shadowing every move of the drums like a stalker in the night. “Tainted Love” is one of the more recognizable songs in western pop music, inarguably I would even say, but under the command of experimentalists Milky Chance this season, it sounds refreshed, with its darkest corners polished for a new generation to enjoy. Milky Chance gives this jam a much headier backend with a thin melodic underpinning courtesy of the vocal, and unless you have an aversion to texturally provocative musicianship, you’re going to like what you hear in this single.
Visually, the music video for “Tainted Love” is more cryptic than its source material, but the sense of doom that we find in the song by itself is still very much preserved in the grander scheme of things. There’s something very disturbing about the surreal layout of this piece, but it’s not done in the same vein as a lot of the postmodern gibberish Milky Chance’s contemporaries have been putting out in the past year. Both cerebral sharp enough to make a real point, it gives the music a perfect counterpart to fully clarify what this band is trying to say with their cover.
Watch the video for “Tainted Love” by Milky Chance
I see “Tainted Love” as the full-package introduction to Milky Chance they likely could have started their career off with, but at the same time, it definitely provides listeners and a litany of eager critics with confirmation of what some had already guessed early on – which is that these players are as inventive as they are talented. “Tainted Love” is by no means a new song to cover, but it’s in this version that we’re able to learn a little but more about Milky Chance, which isn’t always the case when recording music you didn’t write yourself.
