Eurovision 2015: Albania: Elhaida Dani: Diell

Elhaida Dani

Diell (Sun) sung by Elhaida Dani has won the ticket to represent Albania at the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna. The song was among eighteen compositions vying for the win at the annual Festivali i Këngës (Song Festival) held in Tirana.

The three-hour show was the culmination of two epic semi-finals, during which twenty-six songs were performed.

In the final, Elhaida Dani was the last to take the stage and, after a very dramatic performance, her victory was revealed to be a near landslide. Of the seven jury members, including Albania's 2012 represenative Rona Nishliu, six of them gave Diell their top score.

A resounding victory is nothing new for Ms Dani, of course. In 2013, she participated in Italy's version of The Voice, winning the show with more than two thirds of the public vote.

Can she repeat the feat in Austria in May, 2015? My hunch is that she won't be able to do it again, particularly with this song.

I've listened to it a couple of times and I'm still not really sure why it won the national final. Elhaida Dani's vocals are great, so no complaint there. They're powerful, dramatic and they soar. The problem is with what she is singing.

As is usual with the entries from Albania, they start off their lives in their native language. That's fine, but it's already a barrier for a non-native speaker. So, one is reliant on the melody and the overall performance.

It's always a positive to have the music provided by a live orchestra and at no time did Elhaida Dani appear as if she was battling with it. She's obviously a more than competent stage performer, who is also easy on the eye.

Unfortunately, Diell is a very pedestrian power ballad with no obvious hook to it. Despite the singer's emotional input which endeavours to involve the audience, the melody goes nowhere and the whole package ends up sounding like a second-rate Disney tune.

Without some much needed changes, Albania could easily become a casualty of the semi-finals once again.

What do you think?

[Update: Diell has been withdrawn and replaced with I'm Alive as the Albanian entry. A review will appear once the the new song is made public.]

Meet the singer

Eurovision 2015: Belarus: Uzari & Maimuna: Time

Uzari and Maimuna: (Image Facebook)

The process of choosing the song to represent Belarus at the Eurovision Song Contest is not usually one which runs too smoothly - or, so it seems, without some kind of fallout.

This time, after a lineup of fifteen competitors fought for the right to represent the country in Vienna next year,  Uzari and Maimuna were ultimately crowned the winners with the song, Time.

For many, this was not the song that was predicted to win before the staging of the national final. That honour was bestowed upon the girl-group Milki and the song Accent, both a product of past Eurovision winner Alexander Rybak. As it turned out, neither the public vote nor the combined jury points placed Milki at the top of the pile, which prompted an angry outburst from the 2009 victor.

Rybak's consternation aside, the weighted votes of the jury put Time in first place, a full ten points ahead of the runner-up, Anastasia Malashkevich with Don't Save My Name. Having endured terrible audio on the internet feed from Minsk, practically all of the contenders sounded dreadful to me - including the much-lauded newcomers, Milki.

Uzari, however, has competed in the previous two Belorussian national finals without much luck, but combining talents with the beautiful violinist Maimuna has changed his fortunes - even if this wasn't a landslide victory.

Neither the public nor all of the members of the jury were behind Time. It's not surprising as the standard of all the songs was less than ideal.

Time tries to be a pop/rock song with classic overtones, courtesy of the violin. It starts off with promising drama, but that promise soon turns to disappointment as Uzari begins his vocals. The chorus sounds worse than the verses; a cat on heat is more in tune.

It's not only the vocals that let this song down. The lyrics leave something to be desired, as well. What exactly does "Time is like thunder" mean? Having read the text of the song, it looks mostly to be a collection of random words thrown together in the hope that they make sense. It's a shame really, as the melody and the hook are quite memorable.

How it fares in the Contest will be dependent on the staging and the set-up of the semi-finals, though. By any standards, the vocals will need improvement by May.

As it is now, I foresee Belarus failing to make the Grand Final. What are your thoughts?

Eurovision 2015: Netherlands: Trijntje Oosterhuis: Walk Along

Trijntje Oosterhuis: This Is The Season

If you know anything about Dutch popular music, you'll know that Trijntje Oosterhuis has been one of The Netherlands' biggest recording stars, having enjoyed commercial success at home since the mid-1990s. She will now display her considerable talent in Vienna on the 2015 Eurovision stage performing the song Walk Along.

Before embarking on her productive solo career however, she was part of the band Total Touch with her brother, Tjeerd. The pair secured two multi-platinum selling albums in the Dutch charts before breaking up. Since then, Trijntje has registered five Top 5 albums of her own.

Her last one was released in 2012 and entitled Wrecks We Adore. It was a Dutch Number 1 and produced by Holland's 2013 representative, Anouk, who registered a Top 10 Eurovision placing with the song Birds. Anouk has now composed Walk Along as the country's 2015 entry, seemingly providing backing vocals to the track as well.

Unlike Birds (and Calm After the Storm) however, the song's release has come particularly early for the Dutch entry. Both The Common Linnets' and Anouk's efforts were not announced until April/May of their respective years.

Timing aside, Walk Along is revealed as a jaunty, singalong acoustic guitar-driven composition which not only highlights Trijntje's superior voice, but also the obvious talent and influence of Anouk.

Her impact belies Trijntje's preference for the jazz genre, instead giving this track a more modern pop/rock feel. Initially, it sounds more accessible than the Dutch songs of the past two years, but they both did well without the cheery banality that infects a lot of Eurovision's output.

That's not to say that Walk Along is unimaginative and uninspired. It has a good hook with a memorable chorus, although some might find irritating the obvious repetitiveness in the second half of the song.

Hopefully, that won't harm its chances in qualifying for the Final next year. I'd like to see The Netherlands there again.

How about you?

Above image by Henk Bezemer (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-4.0], via Wikimedia Commons