In Belgium the French broadcaster RTBF is once again at the helm and as of lately this usually bodes for a pretty decent result. Will young Eliot cut the mustard?
Once again super producer Pierre Dumoulin has been asked to contribute and this year’s entry Wake Up is not without certain qualities. Like City Lights it’s rather contemporary and well produced. The composition is original and sophisticated. Add decent lyrics conveying a message worth listening to, credibly performed by a talented, young artist, and it sounds a whole lot like a familiar recipe. However, as tempting as it may be to try and recreate previous successes there are pitfalls. It is challenging enough maintaining the same high quality, let alone having the ability to constantly outdo oneself and create something even better.
And everyone who was hoping for City Lights 2.0 became quite disappointed when Wake Up was released back in February which by the way went pretty much under everyone’s radar. The buzz around this year’s entry has been nonexistent, it’s almost like the broadcaster immediately realized they probably had a non-qualifier on their hands so why bother.
So what’s wrong with this year’s entry? Our biggest concern is the tempo shift in the chorus; it slows down, like Icebreaker. We find this really off putting. And we don’t know much about the performer Eliot, which is mainly due to the lack of promotion, but something tells us he’s not the most outgoing and charismatic artist in this year’s line-up. We doubt he has the ability to lift a mediocre song with a smashing performance. We don’t want to be too harsh on him, after all it looks like he’s only around 12 years old, but obviously he’s old enough to compete with the grown-ups. And if the music video is anything to go by on how the staging will look like in Tel Aviv we guess Wallonia will run out of beige organic cotton.
From the weakest semi-final we suppose anyone can end up squeezing through to the final, but we get the feeling the Belgian delegation has booked their return tickets back to Brussel on Wednesday already.
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