ESC Covers, like in previous years, google translated ESC Norge discussion on the Eurovision song contest positions, from Norwegian to English.
This is a blog post and only represents the writer Morten Thomassen’s own views.
Two countries finished with 218 points in the final and our Albanian friends finished first of these two countries as they received more points from the people than the country that got the place behind them Ukraine, it is a little different how the order of results is determined depending on whether you look at just one vote or two votes combined as the final result is, it should not be easy.
Of the 21 times our Albanian friends have participated, they have reached the final 12 times, so only a slight preponderance of final places there, but this year the group Shkodra Elektronike came in 2nd place in their semi-final and they have not had such a good placement since 2012 when their best placement ever came, this year’s 8th place is the third best placement, so every reason to honor the song “Zjerm” in other words.
“Zjerm” means mirror of all things in the world and Beatrice and Kolë, who make up this duo, received a lot of good feedback on their journey from the national final to the international final and many believed and hoped that they would at least take home Albania’s best placement ever, but they were just 3 places short of achieving that, but this country has never had more than 200 points in total, so they could take home that victory.
It’s true that Albania got 5th place with the people, which wasn’t particularly surprising, but the fact that the jury had this all the way down to 16th place probably came as more of a surprise, this song had many elements that a jury usually likes.
It’s possible that the juries punished them a bit because the great song they had was quite poorly packaged visually, there’s little here that tells me as an audience what this song is about, it’s just a lot of red, white and black in a blissful mix and it just gets a bit boring.
Good vocals are captivating and once again I feel that the TV experience of a song is marred by the fact that the audience sound is almost completely absent, a little bit of the audience’s reactions would have spiced up this TV experience.
As usual, Christmas decorations and the Albanian finale are happening at the same time in the Grand Prix homes and that’s probably how it will be in December this year too, just start counting down the days until Christmas.ESC
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