It makes good sense to open our review season with Switzerland. When most of us are far more preoccupied with getting drunk on Christmas office parties than obsessing about the ESC national final season, it suddenly hits us that the Swiss have already gone ahead and picked their song for Europe the following year. By mid March we’ve sort of already forgotten it ever happened. But after all it’s where it all started back in 1956 and the Swiss even managed to take home the victory themselves on home-turf, penning the name Lys Assia down in gold forever after in the history of the Eurovision Song Contest. This introduction had been neater if the same Lys Assia actually went on to win this year’s national final and the right to represent Switzerland in Baku, but unfortunately she crashed pretty badly with her outdated chanson and rather pompous performance.
The Swiss audience went for the more contemporary duo Sinplus, one of the better alternatives in a rather weak line-up. We do however struggle to find something interesting to say about this song. It’s not exactly unbearably bad, it’s just very mediocre. The guys in the band kinda reminds us of A1 like they used to look like when they rightfully could still call themselves a boyband, but the music sounds more mature, similar to how A1 sounds like nowadays when they try to move into the more credible music genre in direction of U2, The Killers, Muse etc. So where does that leave Sinplus? Unfortunately as a copy of a copy, and that’s not very appealing.
We did of course find the lead singer’s peculiar English pronunciation rather amusing, but in the recorded version of the song it seems like he has improved substantially so there goes the entertainment aspect down the drain as well. At least a thick accent can be seen as charming, or annoying and it can steer up some kind of reaction, just think of Lena’s mockney accent. What we’re left with is a couple of pretentious and unengaging poseurs with a bland song. Which is, when we come to think of it, rather unbearable.
“Swim against the strim, following your wildest drim, your wildest drim…” Oh dear. I hate to make fun of someone’s accent, but I agree, his English pronunciation leaves a lot to be desired. I do like this song, but it’s done what the majority of Swiss songs do – in the beginning, when there’s only a few songs chosen, it looks pretty good. But as more and more come in, it starts to come off rather mediocre.
Well, we hate to make fun of other people accents ourselves as it’s obviously a great accomplishment to bother to learn another language, unlike most native English speakers do. But if someone is so uncomfortable with singing in English, it will probably be better to do a version in the native language instead, as it comes to a point where the accent is so distracting you stop enjoying the song.