POLAND 2022

The Polish final "Tu bije serce Europy! Wybieramy hit na Eurowizję "was held on February 19th at the TVP TV Studios in Warsaw, hosted by Rafal Brzozowski, Malgorzata Tomaszewska and Ida Nowakowska. The winner, chosen by a 50/50 split of jury and televoting was Ocham, with the song "River".

Krystian Ochman was born and raised in the USA and came from a musical background. Although he was more interested in sport and wanting to play football, he was encouraged to learn piano and trumpet. In 2020 he participated in the Polish version of "The Voice" where he joined the team of former Eurovision participant  Michał Szpak and ended up winning the whole competition.

The song starts off with a rather sombre piano introduction, as Ochman starts to sing the drums break up the rather sparse backing track. The very short verse starts with a immediate mention of the title. Unusually (although you don't realise this until the very end) the title of the track is not in the chorus and more a mention in other parts of the song. This is followed by a short pre-chorus before going into the falsetto of the chorus. This set is repeated  which takes us up to the two minute mark. Here there is a more free-form bridge which slows the pace right down. Finally the last chorus comes punching in and than the first line of the first verse is repeated again as a slow outro.

Ochman has a very wide ranging voice. It also covers a lot of tones. textures and skills all of which seem to be showcased in this 3 minute song. At some points it does feel like one person is singing the parts that the individual parts of a group should be doing. That said, he does not look or sound uncomfortable about pushing himself in that way. Although I think the first and last line containing the name of the song as being rather clever, it does leave a lot of the song without a clear identity. Therefore the delegation may need to be savvy about which part of the song they use as a recap clip for the voting. There are also clear parallels between this song and "Arcade" - even the oooohing part feels extremely close. There are also some similarities to "O Jardim" too although this Polish song seems very lacking in emotion when compared. I wonder if part of this is down to him not connecting down the camera. Many of the shots used in the national final were sweeping & wide and he spends a lot of time either not opening his eyes at all or looking slightly past the camera. I am sure this song will pull together the diaspora and will get the voting but I am not sure if this is going to set all the voters and jury mmebers alight.

ARTIST - Ochman

SONG - River

WRITING/PRODUCTION CREDITS - Ashley Hicklin, Krystian Ochman, Mikołaj Trybulec, Adam Wiśniewski