Saturday Reject: Aistė Pilvelytė – Unbreakable

“I defy you to find me a Eurovision fanatic who wouldn’t lose their absolute shit to this on a dance floor.”

Tom: Right, after a week of Sweden: what’s the rest of Europe got?

Tim: Lithuania had an interesting result this year (well, for a given value of interesting): not just a landslide televote gap between the winner and runner up, but also a landslide gap between that and third place, and continuing down in a sort of reverse exponential curve.

Tom: A “power-law distribution“, I believe.

Tim: Here’s the third place, which actually got quite a bit more love from the the public than the jury.

Tom: That’s… like Carola’s Invincible, but not quite as good?

Tim: Hmm, I’ll give you similarities, I guess, but…nah. Either way, this is a BANGER of sorts, at least compared to everything else on offer that night, and I’m often left wondering what it is that jurors are told to base their votes on. Just the song, with a combination of melody, genre, lyrics; the performance and stage presence of the artist; the lighting and the stage decoration; how they think it’ll do on the night; or just whether or not they individually like it?

Tom: I tried to look up the rules, but couldn’t find anything: I do wonder how much deliberation there is between the jurors, too.

Tim: Because I’ll be entirely honest: for at least the first three of those things, I can’t find a problem with this, at all.

Tom: I’m not convinced by every high note in there, but sure, I don’t know why the jury would rate it that much lower. Perhaps it’s too much schlager and not enough Serious Pop.

Tim: Yeah, it’s that fourth which would most explain it: danced-up schlager isn’t exactly in vogue right now amongst the general populace, which I suppose slightly justifies it (though I defy you to find me a Eurovision fanatic who wouldn’t lose their absolute shit to this on a dance floor). If it’s the fifth, though, well, that’d just show them all to be idiots.