Europop – Page 18

GAMMAL – Sånger Från Förut

“t feels like it’d be more at home in a movie trailer than in a pop playlist.”

Tom: CAPS LOCK BAND NAME

Tim: APPARENTLY IT’S NECESSARY. “This is how it sounds when a burning nostalgia is mixed with a summer evening, when you lose yourself in dance and spirits and love, and in that moment everything is okay.”

Tom: Oh blimey. The copyeditor’s been working overtime, then?

Tim: Spoiler alert: that does actually come across, and it’s not just meaningless PR garbage!

Tom: Damn it, you’re not wrong, and I’m actually slightly grumpy about that. It’s those harmonies in the second verse, isn’t it?

Tim: Amongst many other things, yes. I don’t understand the lyrics in real time, but it doesn’t matter, because the emotion flows perfectly. Starts out a bit downbeat, but picks up the pace to show that things aren’t so bad. Then we’ve got that brilliant instrumental bit, which although is technically a post-chorus, almost feels better suited to being a lengthy intro to a fresh part of the song. And the fresh part is still great, a bit heftier until we drop back down for a final look back at the times that have gone.

Tom: Like I said: second-verse harmonies!

Tim: But finally everything comes together, with a repeat of the chorus and then a reprise of that glorious earlier instrumental break, with upbeat and triumphant brass all over it, and it all just sounds so, so wonderful. Everything is conveyed perfectly, the message comes across, and the song just works.

Tom: Is it actually something I want to listen to, though? With something like this, it feels like it’d be more at home in a movie trailer than in a pop playlist.

Tim: You say that, it brings me nicely to my final point: as a pop song it’s pretty good; as a piece of music, it’s outstanding.

LIAMOO, Steerner, Hechmann – Broken Hearted

“I’m damning with faint praise again, aren’t I?”

Tim: LIAMOO, a Swedish singer we’ve not properly featured before as I’ve never really liked any of previous tracks – bit too heavy on the deep twisted vocals, a bit light on any pleasant melody.

Tom: In which case, thank you for not sending them over to me.

Tim: You’re very welcome. Finally, though, he’s up with a couple of producers, Swedish and Danish respectively, and provided something altogether more listenable.

Tom: “Somebody once told me” is a brave choice for a song’s first lyric.

Tim: I don’t know, I’d say the fact that the melody, tone, timing, mood and everything else allow it – for starters, I’d not even clocked the resemblance. But anyway: occasionally the single two word combination ‘guitar pop’ can be enough to put me right off a song without hearing a single note, but I think this is a right cracker of a track. Admittedly towards the end of it, and in the dance post-chorus breakdowns, there’s a whole lot more to it than that, with it arguably verging off into a different genre altogether.

Tom: This does risk falling into an uncanny valley between two genres: but, hey, it worked for Avicii.

Tim: But even before all that comes along it’s a strong sounding number, with a good melody and enough going on in the background to keep it interesting.

Tom: I don’t think it’s going to light up the charts anywhere, but sure, it’s listenable. It’s going to sit in the middle of an ‘upbeat guitar pop’ Spotify playlist. I’m damning with faint praise again, aren’t I?

Tim: Yes, but at least there’s still deserved praise there – when that massive drum build comes along after the verse and, yes, it’s dance banger time. Enjoyable throughout, I like it.

KEiiNO – Spirit In The Sky

“OKAY THEN let’s have a debrief.”

Tim: OKAY THEN let’s have a debrief. ITEM ONE: the winner was tedious garbage which won because every country found it basically okay (perhaps the lowest proportion of 12 points for a winner ever, just 8 out of a possible 80).

Tom: It’s an awful compromise victor, the Eurovision equivalent of a shrug. I’ll be honest, I think this is the first time I’ve been genuinely annoyed by a Eurovision result. I think part of that is John Lundvik’s face when he hears the final numbers: that was such a good track, my favourite of the night, and to end up sixth with less than half of the televote points he needed is absolutely brutal.

Tim: It really is, because it’s great, though your mention of John Lundvik leads us on to ITEM TWO: my favourite, a.k.a. ours, did appallingly, coming last overall but technically not coming last with either the jury (sorry, Spain) or the televote (suck it, Germany, with your NO POINTS), so I’m viewing that as not a complete loss.

Tom: Mm. Part of that is surely the Brexit effect, but I’m still baffled as to why that’s your favourite. Moving on.

Tim: ITEM THREE: Finland, with their dance champion Darude, finished dead last in their semi-final, and by no small margin.

Tom: I previously predicted middle of the table for that, so I was completely wrong. Given some of the other dreck in there, I’m surprised it did that badly.

Tim: It does, mind, conclusively prove my point from a few weeks back that star power is absolutely not a thing – hell, it’s arguable that the worst performance of the night was Madonna’s. ITEM FOUR: as with last year, we’ve the occasional significant disparity between the initial juries and the later televotes (looking at you with smug satisfaction North Macedonia, looking at you with slight sympathy Sweden, and looking at you with delight Spain).

Tom: If they go full jury vote, it feels wrong. If they go full televote, diaspora votes take over. There’s no good answer.

Tim: True, and I guess we just have to trust that most of the time it more or less works. Other times, though, it causes an issue, such as ITEM FIVE, being this from Norway. Won the televote, and had a severe technical cockup on the jury viewing but weren’t allowed to redo it. SCANDAL, cried NRK, and most pop fans across Europe, because, well, watch and listen.

Tim: Isn’t it great?

Tom: It’s certainly nice to know what René from Aqua’s up to these days. (I joke, but that guy’s actually called Fred-René, which is a pleasant coincidence.)

Tim: Oh, that is fun. Thing is, I didn’t appreciate it hugely during my initial run through, but having watched it in its semi-final and then again on Saturday, it was the winner of the ‘stuck in your head the next morning’ test, which isn’t surprising when we break it down bit by bit. It’s a good melody, it’s a strong message, a hefty beat, and with its joik it includes a bit of regional music, such as I was lamenting the loss of just a few days ago.

Tom: And it’s regional music that still works for a regular European audience. They’ve done well to integrate it. It’s a good song, and it would have been a deserved winner. And yet, we’re stuck with the Netherlands. Which means Eurovision 2020 will probably be a year of soppy piano ballads. Ugh.

Tim: Shall we all read this, from just two weeks ago?

Laura Bretan – Dear Father

“It’s actually quite nice when people break the rules a bit.”

Tim: Split voting, televote vs jury, is always tricky, as we found out yesterday, and there’s no real perfect way of sorting it, though I’d say Sweden comes closest with its splitting the whole 270 televotes points down by percentage and giving equal weight to public and jury.

In contrast, Romania’s system gave this one, which scraped two thirds of all public votes, 12 points, and then the next one 10, despite it barely scraping 20%.

Tom: Ouch, that’s harsh. Of course, perhaps the idea is to minimise the chance of a Runaway Public Winner outweighing the expert opinion?

Tim: Add that to the fact that there were six jurors who each had the same points level as the whole public combined, and this easily got knocked back.

Tom: Huh. Maybe the idea is just to use the public as a tiebreaker.

Tom: For the first half of this, I’d written “the jury members are probably right”, because I couldn’t see why the public went for it. And then… well.

Tim: Curious structure, here, perhaps forced upon it by the relative calm for much of it, with us completely missing out the second chorus and middle eight and instead jumping straight to that lovely key change. Sometimes I’d complain, but when you’ve only got three minutes to play with it’s understandable, and it’s actually quite nice when people break the rules a bit.

Tom: And when they have such a spectacular voice. I don’t know why I think this works: the first half is slow and dull, the operatic vocals should be just ridiculous, but somehow — and I think this is down to the performer — I can see this doing really well, in the way that extremely competent, extremely noticable tracks do sometimes at Eurovision.

Tim: Also, of course, it helps that so much of what we do have is so good. In the first chorus there’s the shock value of ‘oh, so that’s what we’re doing’, which allows us to skip past the fact that it’s relatively damp. There’s that slight beat coming for the second verse, and then, yeah, that key change, the proper use of her impressive voice and then that backing chanting to bring everything to a climax. So, if someone could have a word with TVR about how democracy works, that’d be great, cheers.

Maxim Zavidia – I Will Not Surrender

“It’s very much Classic Eurovision.”

Tom: Tonight, on “Eurovision entrant or Harry Potter spell”…

Tim: You may or may not want to sing “From the day we arrived on this planet” over the first line of this Moldovan runner up; I certainly did, but as for the rest of it, well, take a listen.

Tom: Good grief, you’re not wrong there. I wonder if that was deliberate?

Tim: So, we’ve a Lion King rip-off, but only really for the intro and middle eight, so I’m very much inclined to excuse that, largely because the rest of it is just so damn good.

Tom: You’re not wrong there. It’s very much Classic Eurovision, the sort of thing that’d show up on that schlager YouTube channel you keep linking me to, and I suspect that’d count against it these days.

Tim: There are criticisms that could legitimately be made, sure – for starters, the fact that there is no key change in the long note at 2:15 is downright criminal – but this song, as a Eurovision entrant, is absolutely outstanding. The two-act middle eight works well, despite the aforementioned lack of a key change, and the vocal strength, the melody, the energy, the everything is right there.

Tom: Full marks for having a whole extra bar of silence in there, as well. It’s a brave choice, but somehow it works. And that final note is a heck of a way to end it.

Tim: As for the staging, I’ve no idea what the clock’s doing, and certainly not why it starts spinning backwards the moment he sings about reaching tomorrow, but the reveal of the ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ T-shirts is fun and ludicrous, and while I frequently complain about sparks showers being present when there’s nothing to deserve it, this absolutely should come with one. It’s wonderful, and so what really hurts is that it came second.

Thing is, it absolutely wiped the floor in the televote, getting almost as many votes as all the other eleven entries combined, but was largely slated by the jurors.

Tom: Of course: it’s Classic Eurovision, and that’s not what the juries look for. I wonder if that would have been repeated in the main event? We’ll never know. Thanks, jurors.

Tim: Pooheads, all of them.

Uku Siveste – Pretty Little Liar

“Earnest vocals, weird dancing, and hair that sticks up at the back like he’s forgotten to brush that bit properly.”

Tim: Let’s continue looking through some Rejects, as there are plenty of decent ones to get through and very limited time. This here is the runner up of Estonia, which in the end chose a Swede to sing an above average track; this one, in my view, is quite a bit better.

Tim: It’s worth admitting that there isn’t much here that’s innovative or ground breaking, but that’s not necessarily what Eurovision’s for.

Tom: What is it for, bizarre staging decisions? Who decided that keeping the singer off camera for the first verse was a good idea? Anyway, yes, sorry, Eurovision.

Tim: It’s for good pop songs, with good verses that move into great choruses, with volume, energy, and spark showers as appropriate. And here, we have all of that and more – earnest vocals, weird dancing, and hair that sticks up at the back like he’s forgotten to brush that bit properly. Excellent stuff, all round.

Tom: It’s a solid middle-of-the-table track, really, isn’t it? It’d do okay with the juries and get a few televote points, but that’s about it. That’s not necessarily an indictment of the song itself, it’s just… okay.

Saturday Reject: BLGN & Mirex – Champion

“Doing his best Rag’n’Bone Man impression.”

Tim: It struck me the other day that we’ve only one week left to go until the big day, yet as far as rejects go we’ve barely set foot outside Scandinavia. Here’s Belarus’s very, very close runner-up, doing his finest Rag’n’Bone Man impression.

Tim: Now, you might’ve thought that with that intro I’d be mocking him, or accusing him of being unoriginal, but no, not at all: I think this is a genuinely great song, in a style that works very well when it’s done properly.

Tom: You’re not wrong. That’s a bold style to choose: if you miss one note or if you slur your words, you’re going to end up being all Shooting Stars Club Singer. He gets close sometimes, but I can see why you think it’s a good choice.

Tim: And here, it really is. I don’t want to speak for Mr Bone Man–

Tom: “Rag’n’” to his friends.

Tim: — but if he were to announce this as the first single off his next album, I’d be looking forward to it. It’s got power, it’s got a strong message, it’s got a good hook, it’s got what a Big Song needs. Belarus’s entry this year is fairly decent – but I’m surprised the juries preferred it to this.

Adel Tawil feat. Peachy – Tu m’appelles

“Bilingual is novel, sure, but that doesn’t make it a good track.”

Tim: Our reader, Alix, sends this in, the latest from German singer Adel; I can unfortunately tell you nothing about Peachy, as there seem to be a good three or four acts going by that name and I’ve no idea which this is. Still, the song’s French and German, have fun with it.

Tom: I briefly thought that the peaches in the music video were apples, and they were doing a trilingual pun on “m’appelles”, but sadly not.

Tim: Sadly not, no. I like this, a lot. I was initially drawn in by the slight bilingual novelty of it – sure, you might get the odd word of English sprinkled into a foreign track, or Spanish in a Shakira/Enrique/Pitbull/etc middle eight, but outside Eurovision it’s rare to see a song that’s basically half and half. Also, purely on a personal level, I like that they’re both languages I have a vague level of competency with, giving a vague sense of the meaning.

Tom: “Tu m’appelles”, it turns out, just starts to irritate me when it’s repeated this much in what I assume are two separate accents. Bilingual is novel, sure, but that doesn’t make it a good track. Why do you like it?

Tim: I think it’s just a fairly enjoyable track – it’s catchy, it’s got a good melody, a fun and entirely not irritating lyric video, and all in all I do like it.

Tom: I’m just not sold on it. I think it’s a combination of the chord progression and the ominous brass synths that sound like they’ve been taken from a discount movie trailer.

Tim: Harsh. And admittedly I’m not sure it’ll fit on my regular playlist, mind, but it’s good to hear.

Sandro Cavazza – Enemy

“Sounds good, but let’s keep it below three and a half minutes please.”

Tim: I have a few podcasts on my phone that I’m several months behind on, and so I typically play them at at least 1.2x speed.

Tom: Only 1.2x? I used to listen to podcasts at 1.5 way back, and now basically everything I watch on YouTube is going at 2x.

Tim: Oh, well get you and your speedy brain. Anyway this sounds kind of like that.

Tim: Admittedly, YouTube’s next lower speed option, 0.75x, sounds too slow, but it does feel a little sped up, no?

Tom: See, if you hadn’t mentioned it to me, I would probably have just thought “that’s a bit jaunty”, but you’re right. It’s most noticeable at 1:50: that transition is just a bit too fast.

There is a custom speed option in those settings, incidentally: the quality’s not as good if you do that, but I’ll tell you that at 0.9x it just sounds like a mediocre Ed Sheeran album track. That speed difference perks it up.

Tim: I don’t mind, really, but I do get the feeling that a Universal exec heard a four minute track and said “sounds good, but let’s keep it below three and a half minutes please”. It’s good, though, and I like it.

Tom: There’s a weird genre of YouTube called “nightcore” where someone takes a regular song, speeds it up — without pitch correction, so it sounds higher too — and… well, that’s it. That’s the whole thing. In the same way that televisions in shops have their brightness and colour turned up to maximum to ‘look better’ while people are deciding on them, accelerating a song can make it seem… well, not better, but certainly more interesting, at least for a while. Perhaps that’s what’s happened here.

Tim: The speed does work, as we get through plenty of good stuff in a fairly short amount of time, and it’s got a decent melody, vocal, and all that lot. Nice. Fast, and nice.

DJ Ötzi, Nik P. – Ein Stern (Bassflow Remix)

“Gravelly German vocals! Unnecessarily emotional video! And what sounds like an entire football stadium singing along!”

Tim: DJ Ötzi’s coming up on 20 years in the industry; to celebrate that, he’s releasing a THUMPING remix of his most successful track (which we covered a while back) with a brand new video.

Tom: I am already preparing to yell the words “HAVE IT”.

Tom: HAVE IT.

Tim: Oh, ain’t it brilliant? You start out thinking ‘hang on, are we jumping way out of the usual here and doing it as a piano ballad?’, but then soon enough you realise that no, of course we’re not, we’re sticking true to the sound he’s had for the whole two decades he’s been around, and it’s still sounding great.

Tom: Ötzi! Gravelly German vocals! Unnecessarily emotional video! And what sounds like an entire football stadium singing along! Not a choir — they’re all singing the same note. Or, at least, the synth that’s simulating them is only playing one note.

Tim: Fabulous, all of it. In fact, it’s sounding BIGGER and BETTER than before, with more bass, more banging, more build to what has now become a PHENOMENAL key change, and just all round BLOODY MARVELLOUS.

Tom: And Nik P’s big note at the end! I’ll say it again, Tim: HAVE IT.