ESC Covers start the Eurovision 2024 countdown from position 37 to the top place. We are using the review of Morten Thomassen from Norway. ESC Covers google translated it from Norwegian to English.This is a blog entry and represents only writer Morten Thomassen’s own views.
Next we are going to a country that has become very fond of recycling its ESC artists and so far in this decade it has gone well, but even the best plans can sometimes go awry and now this country went down the drain.
The last time Natalia Barbu participated, she snuck into the final with a 10th place, the last time only one semi-final was held and rumors say that at that time she had the threat that she would have to pay for her stay herself if she did not get a final place. Whether the same threat hung over her head this time is not known, if so it was an expensive week in Malmö for her.
Own share of the stay or not, the fact that the final place went badly this year is probably more due to the common mistake of a well-known artist winning the national final with a song that can at best be called perfectly decent and perfectly decent songs very rarely do well in ESC.
The combination of singing and solo playing on the fiddle has, as you know, been very successful before, but then with a song that had something catchy about it and Natalia’s song probably didn’t have that to any great extent, they had only done as good a job on the song selection as on a cool dress and a colorful background maybe something could have been saved.
That didn’t happen and we sat back with a good vocal and a colorful background on a song that probably gave most people who voted for very little and the violin part can’t exactly be said to lift the song up, it actually dragged it down even more, in addition the lady lacked more people on stage who could have given this song the necessary boost it needed.
No, my Moldovan friends will probably have to go back to what we like best from them and there are songs with Moldovan splash in them, it almost always catches the eye.
Featured image – Corinne Cumming EBU