Shine some light on Switzerland

Please, someone who can speak German, French, Italian or Romansh, tell her she shouldn't enter the stage in such a damp dress.
Please, someone who can speak German/French/Italian/Romansh, tell her she shouldn’t enter the stage in such a damp dress.

What better way to open a new Eurovision season on the International Women’s Day with a strong, independent gal who’s not mucking around, mind you. Is it finally Switzerland’s time to shine again?

 

When Switzerland selected Mélanie René and Time to shine a while back it was still early on in the national selection season and hard to tell how the entry would measure up to its future competitors. With more than half of the songs known by now the Swiss can be pleased it’s 1. Not a ballad, 2. Potentially has a pimp slot in the second semi-final running order and 3. A song that would probably benefit from the bigger staging and better production the ESC format will offer.

The performance in the national final felt a bit amateurish and lacked the power and determination a song with this message demands. We are all in favor of coordinated finger pointing and intricate arm waving choreography, but it just looks a whole lot groovier when let’s say Beyoncé does her thing. We get what Mélanie René is trying to create here, and she does convey a certain talent, but it just becomes too cute and neat and polished. If she wants to command the stage and demand a spot in the limelight, don’t chirp, growl, goddammit! The performance needs to become grittier, grander, bolder, more monumental. And please, lose the utterly unfab guitar solo in the middle there.

In hindsight it might have been better if Switzerland had chosen the group Timebelle with their happy go lucky catchy pop song which probably would have stood out positively in this year’s running. Mélanie René is perhaps not even winning this year’s warrior princess battle as she faces steep competition from several other countries in that department alone. And we swear to God we cannot even begin to understand why it ended up this way, but this is exactly why we love this competition so very much. So bring it on Mélanie René and all you kickass, strong, independent, aspiring warrior princesses out there, show us who deserves to be the queen in Vienna!

5 comments

  1. I kinda like the new version of the song, but my God… who directed that music video? I would have managed to do it better when I was 7 years old…

    It looks like they asked her to move a little bit in different places and then they put everything together in MovieMaker… It’s even worse than the Russian one from 2013? Wow! 😮

    1. The new version of the song is not much of an improvement if you ask us; it’s still just a very boring song going nowhere.

      And the music video is not doing it any favors either, quality wise it barely scrapes above Albania last year. Russia 2013 seems to have been removed from our memory altogether. Probably for the sake of our sanity.

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