Last weekend saw the second semi finals of both the Finnish and Icelandic national selections for this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. This weekend, the third semi finals will take place.
In Finland, we were supporting Waldo’s People and Sani – both catchy gems of the dance/pop mould. Sani finished third unfortunately, which means she goes to the second chance round next weekend, along with Passionworks, the act who came 4th on the night. Waldo’s People qualified directly to the final, with a massive 44% of the votes! Which means that we’re throwing all of our weight behind a Waldo’s People victory in the final next weekend. Their song ‘Lose Control’ is one of the best tracks, if not the best, of the national final season so far – and sending it to Moscow would give Finland their best entry since 1994, when the vivacious CatCat represented their nation with ‘Bye Bye Baby’. It’s an E-Type kind of smash that sounds great in a club, so will sound even better in the Eurovision arena. Remu also qualified directly to the final.
This weekend sees the third semi final happening. You can read our review of the songs here; https://www.scandipop.co.uk/?p=252. It’s by far the weakest heat, so Jari Sillanpaa should have no problem qualifying.
In Iceland last week, the second semi final of Songvakeppnin was broadcast. We didn’t like ANY of the four songs. ‘Undir Regnboggan’ and ‘Vornott’ proceeded to the final, with the other two songs leaving the competition completely, as there is no second chance round in Iceland.
RUV have uploaded three songs from semi final 3 here; http://www.ruv.is/songvakeppnin/. They’ll probably upload the fourth one later. For now though we quite like ‘Lygin Eyn’ by Kaja Halldorsdottir. It sounds like a tATu album track – all industrial beats and telephonic vocals. The other two are just woeful though. ‘Easy To Fool’ is a bad country & western sounding thing, and ‘Family’ is one of the worst songs we’ve EVER hear – despite it being written by the same guy who wrote the rather great ‘Is It True’ – the song that qualified to the final from the first Heat earlier in the month. Iceland – we despair!
