FINLAND

The Finnish Final was held at Logomo in Turku on March 2nd, hosted by Mikko Silvennoinen & Krista Siegfrids. Back in January, YLE announced that they had internally selected Darude to represent the country at Eurovision although he’d be joined on stage by Sebastian Rejman who would sing the vocals anal the tracks. Like last year’s Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu, there were three songs to choose from. The winner was chosen by and equal weighting of televoting & an international jury. The winning song is “Look Away”

The staging of this is relatively simple compared to others of the night, which is maybe why it won. Darude is inside an open-fronted white box where he plays keyboards and on top of it is a female dancer dressed in green. Sebastian starts inside the box but moves to a mic stand just outside. The box rotates as the song goes on until the second verse when the dancer disappears. The back of the box is then revealed to be a video screen and shows the dancers moving through water, which Sebastian interacts with. She then reappears during the last rendition of the chorus.

The song is an electronic number where the backing track is much more intricate than the tune. The verses are a little more piano based and atmospheric whist the beat is quicker in the chorus. The song also has an interesting feature in the fact that not only is the chorus very sparse in terms of words – being ‘look away’ repeated numerous times – but the pre chorus is also used a post chorus too, like a bumper either side of the chorus. Sebastian’s voice is not bad although it is noticeable that he has quite a bit of backing during the chorus which at least tells us where the spare 3 places on stage will be going! The whole thing is really brought together by the backing track which although alternating between different beat speeds, never seems contrived or clunky.

Although nothing about his entry is really outstanding, it does prove that if you put the right bits together something can add up more to the sum of its parts. The visual motifs of the global warming picture s and the underwater dancer works very well to put the song into context, however I think Sebastian needs more time looking into the camera. My main bug bear is that this song to me sounds very close to 2 other songs. Parts of the verses sound like “Keep me hanging on” and the look away bit is exactly the same as Emelie Sande’s “Heaven” and I am actually surprised nothing has been looked into about this. if Jack White can get a writing credit on “Toy” anything can happen!

This is a nice, almost stereotypical, dance number for Eurovision. It does, however, already have a lot of competition in this area, plus some rather alternative dance numbers, so does this have enough to stand out? That is a very tough call to answer. It has direct competition from Estonia in this semi, as well as Slovenia and Belgium in the electronic stakes and I cannot see all 5 of these qualifying. However the fact that Finland has a known name representing them may well get some extra familiarity votes too. This one is really on the cusp.

ARTIST –  Darude ft. Sebastian Rejman

SONG – Look away

MUSIC -  Sebastian Rejman, Ville Virtanen

LYRICS - Sebastian Rejman, Ville Virtanen