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.

Sick Individuals feat. MPH – We Got It All

“This sounds familiar. So, so familiar. But can I place it? Can I hell.”

Tim: This sounds familiar. So, so familiar. But can I place it? Can I hell.

Tom: It’s Zedd and Elley Duhé’s “Happy Now”. I mean, it’s distinct enough, but that’s what you’re thinking of.

Tim: It’s good track, mind, very good, and every little bit stands out. The first part starting out very strong, sounding like a chorus from some unidentifiable other song, then that instrumental dance breakdown, and then the final singy-shouty bit, also a bit familiar but not quite as much.

Tom: You’re not wrong! That’s some of the most promising first seconds I’ve heard in a while. And, once you get over the fact that it isn’t Happy Now, then yep — there’s a lot of good work in here.

Tim: All sounds good, then we go round and do it again for another 83 seconds. And then we’re done, rhythm still in our head.

Tom: And humming the melody to “Happy Now”.

Ina Wroldsen – Body Parts

“This is one of the best tracks we’ve covered in a while, I reckon.”

Tim: Here, a song about ‘the pressure young people are exposed to on a daily basis through everyday life as well as social media’.

Tom: Not about Dr Frankenstein, then.

Tim: Basically: sod your appearance, look how you want.

Tom: Someone threw Scars To Your Beautiful and Fight Song into a blender and this is the result. I don’t mean it sounds like either of those: it’s just very much in the same genre.

Tim: And oh, boy, did that chorus take me by surprise.

Tom: You’re not wrong. “Body parts” are really strange words to sing in such an uplifting tone but somehow it works.

Tim: Up until then, fairly standard track, albeit with the peculiar addition of a Greenwich Time Signal.

Tom: I think that might be intended as a heartbeat on a monitor? But yes, it’s an odd one. Fortunately it doesn’t stick around, and that’s down to the excellent production: the track steadily evolves over time, but it all works as a cohesive whole.

Tim: And sure, the pre-chorus comes along lifting things up a bit, but then ‘salvation’ arrives, and the first ‘body parts’, and suddenly there’s a lot of power there turning a good track into a great track, with a sing-along chorus to rival any of Rachel Platten’s and some of Demi Lovato’s.

Tom: Also good: the middle eight, the vocoder work, the final chorus, and the coda at the end. This is one of the best tracks we’ve covered in a while, I reckon.

Tim: High company and high praise, but well deserved.

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.

JP Cooper feat. Astrid S – Sing It With Me

“Oh, do I have an issue with this.”

Tim: JP’s British, Astrid is, as we’ve heard multiple times, Swedish. And oh, do I have an issue with this.

Tim: At least, I have a problem with the lyric video. Musically, its fine. In fact, it’s good! The melody is nice, the vocals work well together, it’s a pleasant song to listen to!

Tom: You’re not wrong there. This is really nicely put together. I don’t think it’s going to be a classic, but it’s certainly a cut above most of the tracks we cover here. Astrid S continues to have a lovely voice, and JP Cooper makes for a good lead vocalist.

Tim: I like it, quite a lot! BUT. BUT. Oh, why would you use Calibri in a lyric video. Just, why.

Tom: That’s… that’s your problem? It’s a really lovely animated video, and your problem is Calibri?

Tim: There’s clearly been some proper designer involved at some point – the doo-do bits show it slightly, and then that ‘but I can write a song’ proves that someone involved knows what they’re doing – but why the hell would you use Calibri, anywhere? Everyone who has used a computer in the past decade knows it as the Microsoft Word default typeface, and everybody who has used a computer is the past decade will think “have they got, like, no imagination at all?”. It’s distracting. It’s wrong. And, genuinely, with that in the foreground it spoils the song for me. Background tab, it’s fine. But if I’m in the YouTube app on my phone? NO, next track please.

Tom: There’s really nothing wrong with Calibri.

Saturday Reject: Sigmund – Say My Name

“I’d like this to look like most camp low-budget science fiction there’s ever been.”

Tom: Another one for the list of “stop giving new songs the same as classics”. It’s not a Destiny’s Child cover, I presume?

Tim: It is not, no. Though, speaking of big pop songs, you know how occasionally there are Eurovision songs that sound like they could actually be normal pop songs, and you almost feel they’re being wasted as competition entrants? Well, this is kind of like that. Ish.

Tom: “Hello, is that the staging director? Yes, I’d like this to look like most camp low-budget science fiction there’s ever been.” And full marks to the choreographer, they’ve done a great and wholly unnecessary job.

Tim: Choreography is never unnecessary, Tom, not ever. And the thing is, there are also musical elements here that make it seem like a proper song. It’s hard to qualify them exactly, but it’s more the general tone of it, the style, the emotion in the vocal, seems like the singer wants this to be a proper track. Except, it isn’t, and won’t be, because it’s been edited and hacked apart to make it suitable for a Eurovision entrant.

Tom: I think I see what you mean. A proper pop version of this wouldn’t be quite as Full-On Stage Spectacular: that style shows though in the music, even without the ludicrous staging.

Tim: A sensible reworking of this could have made a good pop song, except it lost, and now it’ll never go anywhere. It’s thrown away, chucked out, and this website right here, with our peculiar devotion to songs other countries have firmly said “nope, not for us”, may well be the last place it’ll ever be discussed.

The thing that makes me saddest about that, this year more than ever, is that I’m really not a fan of Denmark’s entry at all – it’s twee, it’s peculiar, it belongs in 1970s Eurovision. This…this could work. Maybe.

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.

jens – Before You Let Me Down

“That squeaky string noise is infuriating. Absolutely infuriating.”

Tim: Here’s one you might initially want to file under ‘irritatingly jaunty’, but keep with it because (a) it gets better and (b) it’s only 2:22 long in any case.

Tom: That squeaky string noise is infuriating. Absolutely infuriating. Occasional use as a stylistic choice, fine, but this is like Matt Bellamy breathing in on early Muse tracks: it’s all you can bloody hear! Which is a shame, because I… actually… think I like the rest of this? I know, that’s unusual for something irritatingly jaunty.

Tim: Verses: I can take them or leave them, but after a few listens I’ve largely come around to them. Chorus: yes, I like that, as it’s halfway between the verses and the best bit. The middle eight and beyond: ooh, very much so indeed please yes, because it’s that initial chirpy bit with a whole load of extra stuff on top of it, and it’s right at that point that I’m annoyed it’s such a short song, because I’d happily take at least another thirty seconds or so of it. As it is, there’s only really just enough of it to lift the rest of it above a rating of ‘hmm, so so’, for me at least.

Tom: For once, I’m actually charmed by this rather than put off. But you know what it needs? One more note. I realise that doesn’t play into the theme of the lyrics, but I’d be a lot happier if we just got a closing guiar note to resolve that open-ended bit at the end.

Well, that and less guitar squeak.

Davai, Lovespeake – Broken Hearts

“Is it awful? Arguably, yes.”

Tim: This here has a high number of f-words and motherf-words, which’d normally put me off. Not with this, though, so headphones on if you’re in public and possibly put the lyric video in a background tab, and press play!

Tom: Who put that bassoon-fart-gone-wrong synth in the chorus? And decided to do a weird, brief vocal-sample-edit middle eight? For the second time, I’ve got more issues with the production here than I have with the actual track.

Tim: So, this is just the sort of song where there’s a roughly fifty-fifty chance of me liking it or hating it, depending on nothing in particularly beyond how I’m feeling when I press play. Is it awful? Arguably, yes. But does it have a surprisingly decent melody? Arguably, also yes.

Tom: And at least it’s only two and a half minutes long.

Tim: Well that’s that, yes, and so it’s really just a question of whether one outweighs the other, I guess, and right now I’m really quite in favour of it. Will I be tomorrow? Not a clue.