Oh my god there are so many songs in Semifinal 1 and I guess it’s time to do the official review of the Finnish entry Look Away by Darude featuring Sebastian Rejman:
*sigh*
Look.
I don’t want to be THAT GUY. You know, the Eurovision hipster who’s always banging on about how it was better in the old days, before LED screens and when people had to sing in their native languages and blah blah blah.
But I am going to be that guy because the Sebastian and Darude performance makes me miss Gromee.
Yes, this Gromee:
Because as much as we loved (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘me’) to poke fun at the awkward, behatted, fish dancing DJ, Gromee had fun – and made us have fun at the same time. Sure, he didn’t make it to the final, but we all enjoyed what he was able to do with a bland man cookie cutter song.
So Darude should expect some comparisons – he’s arguably one of the world’s most famous DJs who has come to the contest with a bland man cookie cutter song.
But the problem is that we’ve got Sebastian singing about some heartfelt but unspecified angst toward world events (children in poverty? climate change?) that means the tone needs to be serious. No fish hands here.
It’s completely hamstrung Darude and his ability to be even remotely charismatic. I mean, look at this ambivalent smirk:
So instead, we have a spinning box and a woman (the epitome of nature? a mother looking for her lost child?) dancing on top of it, and Sebastian Rejman creating a charisma vacuum at the bottom of the stage with a Eurovision message song that lasts for three minutes but does absolutely nothing before or afterwards.
I want to like Darude. And I still think Look Away was the best of the three options that Finland came up with. But now, it’s like they are panicking and realising that watching a DJ with a singer is not that entertaining, and as a result, are throwing a poorly constructed staging idea at the duo. Neither the song nor the act can bear the weight of the gimmicks, and all in all, the whole thing becomes a spectacle of emptiness, a protest song with no genuine feeling.
FINAL VERDICT I’d rate this a Meh – you won’t be able to take a bathroom break because you need to remind all your Eurovision party guests that this is indeed Darude, the DJ of Sandstorm fame, but it might be more entertaining if you turned down the volume on the TV and put Sandstorm on instead.
dudepoints.fun 