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The Albanian Final was held on December 29th at the Palace of Congress
The Albanian entry was chosen via the long running “Festivali i Këngës” which was celebrating its 50th edition. Before the final there were 2 semi finals on the 26/27th December where the initial set of 28 was whittled down to a final of 20. The winner ,as ever, was chosen by a jury and in Eurovision style each member awarded 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10 and 12 points to their preferred entries. This part was quite funny because the presenters were going much too fast for the poor bloke trying to input the scores into the computer which almost brought the graphics to a stand still. By the end I think it was very close to breaking down! However there was a clear winner.
The winning song was “Suus” – meaning Personal – sung by Kosovo-Albanian, Rona Nishliu. Born and raised in the former Yugoslavia
Before I start there are some provisos to my analysis of the winning song. Firstly, the Albanian preselection involves an orchestra. Its addition does gives every song a lot of backbone, atmosphere and extra oooomph, something that won’t be there at Eurovision. Secondly the song is over 4 minutes long and I certainly would not like the job on abridging it down to 3. Thirdly, the song is in Albanian and as of writing I don’t really know what the song is about or what it means, which doesn’t help.
The song starts off as a quiet piano based ballad which then starts to get quite jazz-influenced in places. It is not exactly the most merry of songs and doesn’t really have a sing-along-able tune or hook to catch you and interact with. The song takes quite a while to get warmed up and build to the peaks in the chorus. The chorus however is quite extraordinary. The orchestration really builds and changes to unexpected chord sequences while Rona shouts, screams, yodels and yelps over it like Mary Margaret O'Hara on “November Spawned A Monster” by Morrissey. The instrumental part in the middle is also wonderful to listen to and has an almost military sound to it. Rona is a very inward performer, a bit like Max for Germany back in 2004 and the song also does not give a lot of scope for audience interaction. It is a very memorable song, but possibly not for reasons you would like a song to be remembered.
It is quite hard to give a full and round opinion because so many things about the song have to change. I would be quite shocked if the language of the song was to change. It would be hard, if not impossible, to set English lyrics to such a complicated melody and keep the mood of the song. We will just have to see over the coming months what changes are made and make a judgement then.
As ever, Albania are going to send a very interesting song to Eurovision and I can confidently predict there will be nothing else quite like this one when we get to Baku
SONG - Suus (Personal)
ARTIST - Rona Nishliu
COMPOSER - Florent Boshnjaku
LYRICIST - Rona Nishliu
LANGUAGE – Albanian (title is in Latin)
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