Boombox Blitz: Vanes is tangled in a ferocious ‘Black Jungle’

Welcome to Boombox Blitz, an artist spotlight series showcasing overlooked singers, songwriters and musicians who are quietly taking over the world.

The mind is a wondrous, yet mangled, landscape of the darkest of human emotions. It’s both a place of liberation, a hideaway from the tragedies of the real world, and a terrifying manifestation of the unspoken and the unnamed. Alt-pop newcomer Vanes analyzes his own mental space with his debut offering called “Black Jungle,” a gurgling and distorted ballad that crawls underneath the skin. Almost as a modern-day Gregorian chant, the song is cobbled together with rhythmic-based soundscapes and the singer-songwriter’s unmistakably macabre vocal, as he whispers to himself about what we can’t see and can’t exactly define.

“I live in my Black Jungle where I can wash all my pain/ But maybe this Black Jungle is an echo of my brain,” he admits upfront about his psychological positioning. As his confessions continue to unravel through scratchy and coarse production, a quite charming quality that illustrates the truth of sour cognition, his heart grows stronger. “I think you can understand that I can’t understand myself / But maybe all of us reasons like me / Maybe it’s all a fiction, maybe I’m free,” he weighs later on. His efforts to come to greater understanding of his person is startling but universal, appealing to the most basic of transitions in life.

We all must pass through a prism sooner or later, and only then can we confront who we were meant to become. “There are too many people in my mind / Too many characters for a mind / Too many voices makes me feel blind / But they also give me the power to fly,” observes Vanes, who comes to fully realize that the twisted weeds also serve to replenish the soul, in an obviously skin-binding way. In the accompany visual, he presents his current state through various spliced images, starkly lit and hiding in ghoulish shadows. Even in the bright of day, there is a sobering gloom soaking the cheeks, tightened with a melody that poisons the core.

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Follow Vanes on his socials: Instagram