Moldova in ESC reminds us of the odd cousin you’ll find in every family. You know, the sort who tends to blurt out something inappropriate about your aunt’s weight during a family get-together or shows up at a wedding completely overdressed and in general doesn’t give a tosser about what people might think or say about him. He tends to create a lot of embarrassing situations and you wouldn’t be caught dead defending him, but secretly you love and admire him for being crazy and for having the courage to do whatever he pleases and for not succumbing to what your narrow minded family members might see as fit and appropriate behavior. In your heart, he’s a hero!
We’ve felt this way about Moldova since they blasted on to the ESC stage in 2005 with a drumming Granny and a punk-ska rock band with an Anthony Kiedis look-alike/wannabe as lead singer, and Hallelujah, now they’re back! Or to be more precise, Granny is not back, but the band is. And what was considered as completely wrong and inappropriate for ESC in 2005, yet ended up in 6th place, Moldova’s best placing to date, is perhaps more off than ever. The fan boys and and hardcore ESC fans do of course hate Zdob şi Zdub’s So Lucky with passion and great determination, not leaving it much of a chance. But this is the same crowd whom wholeheartedly believed that Charlotte Perelli would win with a landslide back in 2008, and she wouldn’t even be in the final if the jury hadn’t saved her, so don’t always pay too much attention to the predictions from the assumed ESC experts. We don’t do predictions ourselves, we just want to tell the world which entries we fancy and which ones we hate, and much to our own surprise we actually like Moldova’s effort this year!
Once again they take the role as the odd one out, giving us something completely different than what we asked for. The promo video for the entry displayed in this blogpost is relatively boring, but take a look at their performance in the national final over at YouTube and then you might get a better impression of what we can expect to see in Düsseldorf. It’s bordering on absurd to show up in hats that makes them look like a bunch of garden gnomes, and the drumming Nan is replaced by a pretty girl in an angel costume waltzing around on a unicycle. Woho, how crazy is that? Listening to the song provokes the feeling of just wanting to jump around and trash stuff and makes us forget that we are of course a wee bit too old for that kind of behavior. And even though it’s not as much in your face, we love the ethnic elements such as the clarinet theme in the background and the brassy explosion in the chorus.
So there you have it, we openly admit that we love a song everybody else hates. Let’s wait and see if anybody cares to join us come May and you get the instant urge to jump and shout along to this one after about a dozen appletinis at some party in Düsseldorf!