We don’t get many Chileans in here and (Benjamin Muñoz) Varas isn’t one per se but his roots lie there. He was, though, brought up in a small town called Götene in Sweden, between Gothenburg and Örebro.
He looks like a Chilean footballer with a Beatles haircut.
At 12, he started to play guitar after being introduced to Led Zeppelin by his father and thereby discovered his own stairway to heaven at an early age.
‘Gotta Go’ is his latest single and was recorded at the same time as his recently released EP ‘There You Go!’
The song “touches on times of idiotic admiration”, he says, “when you put someone on a pedestal and nothing can pull them down from it. The consequences could be heavenly or a living hell, and that’s the charm of it.”
Putting someone on a pedestal can take a variety of forms. It could be a politician, an “influencer”, a “celebrity”, a sportsperson, a musician and so on but that phrase usually applies to a partner as it appears to do here, with some hard-hitting and graphic lyrics:
“All of my friends say you gotta go
They say you kill and corrupt my soul
You are the smoke and I’m the lungs
I am the vein and you’re the drug
And you’re pumping in my blood”
The press release for the song makes much of comparisons with Blur and The Strokes in particular and I can see where it is coming from. The main guitar riff is very Blur-like. And yet I’m drawn more to one with the abstract, slightly off the wall Skott, also Swedish of course, and also one from a small town in the middle of nowhere; one indeed in her case where they even have their own language.
Take a listen to her ‘My Name’ for a similar sounding (to my ear at least), zany but catchy chorus and vandalised vocals. Perhaps they should collaborate; it would be interesting to hear what they might come up with. Neither is afraid to stray well off the beaten pop path.
Find him on:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/varas___
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ben.varas/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D
