[LMBTO] It's the battle of the 'long names' - Georgia and B&H decide...

It's unlikely that we are going to get any longer artist names in Stockholm than those from Georgia - Nika Kocharov & The Young Georgian Lolitaz above...
Or from Bosnia & Herzegovina - Dalal & Deen feat. Ana Rucner and Jala!

Good luck, Eurovision commentators - you'll need it with those names.  That's ten seconds of each act's postcard time eaten up just 'presenting their monikers', although the song titles are quite snappy ('Midnight Gold' for Georgia, 'Ljubav je' for B&H).  Realistically, both countries will be aiming for Final qualification rather than the Winner's Trophy but it was interesting how each went about their song selection, given that both were internally chosen to sing for their respective nations.

First up, Georgia - the band wanted submissions from anywhere for their song as long as it had a 'melodic song structure of alternative and indie rock with electronic beats, synths and/or samples, and a club orientation of post-disco dance music'.  No, me neither!  What they ended up with was this after a public vote / international jury split - I could show you all the choices but there was little to choose between them (one was a slower version of the rest).  The winning song by miles was this one:


I lived through the mini-phenomena that was the Brit-pop battle between Blur and Oasis in 1995 and this sounds as though it has the Blur influence from that period...but nowhere on that level!  This example of 'Georg-pop' is all about the musicianship of the band which is not bad at all but unfortunately that will be mimed in Stockholm - all of the drumming, the guitar work and the amp twiddling!  The bit that will be live are the vocals and these make this entry totally forgettable.  I could imagine this track residing somewhere like number seven on a ten song album - not single material, just filler.  To be honest, none of the choices that the band had were any better and this was the runaway winner:
A winner of 'speeding avalanche' proportions but that won't save 'Midnight Gold' from the ignominy of not getting to the Final - I would put it on a likely points par with PKN from Finland in 2015, totally different to everything that normally goes to Eurovision but not in a good way...

Unlike Georgia, Bosnia & Herzegovina took their own musical influences and diversity and put it all in one song:
It starts off all so beautifully traditional - Ana playing her cello, almost reminding me of the theme to 'Game Of Thrones', setting the scene for this entry, leading onto a duet between Dalal and Deen where the true 'Balkan ballad' side of this song lets rip.  Now if that had continued throughout the three minutes, I would have been happy with this - powerful and intriguing, lots of emotional connection through their voices and actions, not a winner by any means but a good enough entry to continue B&H's 100% Final qualification record...

And then Jala appears...
Twenty or so seconds of Bosnian rap totally kills the mood for me - regular readers of this blog will know that I think that rap music never works at the ESC.  The genre is all about the lyrics and its relationship to you in particular - having it in a language you don't understand is totally meaningless to me, as I haven't a clue as to what this part of the song is aimed at.  Does Jala not like Ana?  Is her cello playing not to his taste?  No idea at all and it blows this entry apart as something that I could listen to more than once.  Showing diversity of your nation's music is admirable but it doesn't work here, in my opinion - it could have been dealt with so much better, the rap just feels totally shoehorned in.  For me, "Ljubav je" is now barely better than "Midnight Gold" and I could see this being one of the casualties in their SF if it wasn't for the fact that Croatia and Montenegro are in the draw with them too - Ana's presence will probably succeed in getting a 12 point score from the former nation.  Such a damn shame - Dalal and Deen with the cello accompaniment would have been a decent entry in its own right and might have given B&H a mid-table Final finish.

My predictions for May for these two entries?