BELARUS

The Belarussian final was held on December 26th at the 600 Metrov, Minsk, hosted by Olga Ryzhikova and Denis Dudinskiy. Before the final, there was an auditions process, broadcast online which reduced the field to 15. The song to be sung in Vienna will be "Time" performed by the duo Uzari & Maimuna.

BRTC had an open selection process, as they have had in most recent years. The scoring system in the final was similar to previous years as 1/8 of the score was from televoting whist the other 7 jurors have 1/8 each. Although Muzzart won the televote, they barely got any votes from the jury. At least the Belarussians are transparently opaque! The production and sound values on the webcast sounded awful and so songs that sounded bad may not have been quite as bad as we thought! For this reason, I've also added the audition film below too.

The song starts off as a piano led ballad but grows and grows into something more up-tempo and punchier. The chorus as the main selling point here, or at least should be. The song in itself is written really well with lots of highlights, and a very earworm-y chorus but what it gains in tune it lacks in production values. The violin solo 2 minutes in needs more work as it doesn't work in the performance as it was on the night and the ending is a little odd.

Uzari has quite an intriguing voice and an engaging personality - you certainly feel like he is really pulling you into the song. His voice really suits the song and I quite like the way he can't quite reach the high note in the chorus. Maimuna comes into view just before the first chorus as the music starts to change. She is a very attractive young lady but really doesn't do very much. They interact quite well although at times it looks a bit placed and forced and unnatural. Maybe one they know what the stage will be like they can work something much more stunning and visual. i find this quite odd as their audition performance showed better chemistry than the one in the national final....  Also the clock motifs on the back drop and on screen really worked and I liked the gold cogs-like necklace motif on Uzari's neckline!

This has a lot of potential. Hopefully somebody will make the chemistry between the two much more believable by better use of the staging and much cleaner camera work. As I've already said, quite a bit of work needs to be done on the production value of the backing track. I think if they can get this sorted they will have a really good entry. Adding extra backing singers might beef up the power of the chorus but I do hope not too many dancers are involved - these two are enough!

I am really surprised by this entry and I actually think this is a decent song full stop, never mind a song for Eurovision. If they sort out the production problems and make these two really connect they could be on for a really good placing. This is possibly my favourite Belarus entry ever - but that's not saying much !

ARTIST - Uzari & Maimuna

SONG - Time

MUSIC - Yuri Navrotsky, Svetlana Geraskova

LYRICS - Yuri Navrotsky, Svetlana Geraskova