MONTENEGRO

The Montenegrin Final was held on February 17th at the Hilton Hotel in Podgorica, hosted by Dajana Golubovic & Ivan Maksimovic. The winner was chosen by two rounds of SMS voting - the first to select the top 3 and the second to select the winner. Going to Lisbon is Vanja Radovanovic singing “Inje” (Hoarfrost)

The stage is quite dark and mysterious and Vanja is joined by a pianist on one side and a string trio on the other (although they very oddly did not appear during his main performance, only the reprise – hence the empty chairs!) He is dressed quite smartly in a black suit with intricate golden edging. He wanders about the stage a bit and looks into the camera a bit but seems a little lost and directionless. Behind them all the backdrop is dark with white streaks growing downwards, imitating the spread of the frost Vanja sings about.

The song builds very nicely from a piano introduction. The strings that come in close behind create a very mysterious atmosphere. As he starts singing you wonder if this is going to go more musical theatre but he reins that in quite well. The song doesn’t seem to follow the normal verse/chorus sequence, it feels more like there are a couple of repeated tunes on which the different lyrics are transposed. During the final reprise of the chorus, drums are more prominent which emphasises the build the song has over the three minutes. The ending of the song is very typical of this style of song and punctuates the final seconds of the song in a memorable way.

This is a nice solid Balkan ballad and feels like something different (again) to everything selected for this year’s Eurovision. Vanja seems like a good singer and he seems to have written a decent enough song but there are issues. In a nutshell the whole shebang needs work. The orchestration needs revamping, the staging needs more thought and Vanja really needs to work on his stagecraft.. Having read the lyrics, which are wonderfully poetic, he needs to somehow pin down to the audience what he’s singing about, preferably without becoming a really poor Željko Joksimović tribute act.

I think this would make a very interesting qualifier and in a semi with a couple of close-ish neighbours and Slavic brethren it has a chance of getting a decent vote but I fear this may lose out.

ARTIST – Vanja Radovanovic

SONG – Inje (Hoarfrost)

MUSIC - Vanja Radovanovic

LYRICS - Vanja Radovanovic