AZERBAIJAN

The Azeri act and song was revealed on March 8^th with the release of the fully entry online. Although the broadcaster had announced they were talking with a number of singers, nothing was released about the act or song until the published date. Singing for Azerbaijan is Chingiz with the song “Truth”.

The video starts with a shot of Chingiz plunging underwater. This is then intersperses with shots of different people in a range of quite outlandish costumes. The underwater theme is kept throughout at Chingiz sings a lot of the song in front of a water-effect light. Through the piece there are some very clear and strong lighting effects used and would work very well as a staging idea. There is no real narrative to the video so it will be interesting if they keep the stage concept more fluid or go with something that mirrors the song.

The song is an mid-tempo pop song whose beat is constant throughout the song but is stronger and more visible in the choruses. We start with a verse which leads into a pre-chorus. This part of the song feels like it goes on too long and it might be an idea to chop this down a little so we get to the chorus as soon as possible. The chorus has a chanting feel about it and feels a little bit angry but not enough to feel awkward. There is then a short instrumental where the ‘shut up’ part of the chorus is repeated. We go into another verse but this time leads straight into a chorus which feels much tighter than before. After the chorus instrumental there is a short interlude with distorted voices on it which could be interesting to recreate live! This then goes into the final chorus and instrumental before stopping.

As this is a video premiere there is little to see how well he can perform this live. It must be noted that there is a lot of ‘double singing’ going on i.e. two voices singing at the same time, which makes me wonder if there will be some very well trained and hidden backing singers helping along but this is just conjecture. The other odd concern is that the video from first note to last is 22 seconds too long. Maybe they will just truncate the intro or maybe omit one of the lines of the pre-chorus but this certainly seems a strange notion from an internal selection. Otherwise the song is very instant, very current and also very memorable. This would also not sound out of place on most mainstream radio stations.

Even though this has tough opposition in semi 2 I think this will easily qualify and is most definitely in the running for the win. Whether it wins or not will most certainly be down to presentation on the stage and how well Chingiz can do this live and I really hope he can.

ARTIST –  Chingiz

SONG –  Truth

MUSIC -  Borislav Milanov, Chingiz Mustafayev, Trey Campbell, Pablo Dinero, Hostess, Bo J

LYRICS - Borislav Milanov, Trey Campbell, Pablo Dinero, Hostess, Bo J