For some random reason, Armenia is doing a national final. Well, not that I’m complaining, I happen to like national finals more than internal selections. Let’s see if Armenia will disappoint us or not.
The show started a little abruptly with a short flag parade-like introduction, with all participants being introduced by walking out on stage. Like I said, I like this way of opening because it’s efficient and interesting at the same time. After some explanation about how voting works and some general talking (hey, they haven’t had a national final in ages, so let’s let them have their moment), the songs began. All in all, that took less than 10 minutes, which is nice.
As a song, this isn’t actually that bad. While you can easily tell that this was (co-)written by Thomas G:son, it’s one of his better works for sure. The live performance isn’t very good. The staging is very dark, the camera is shaky and aimless, and the wide shots make it look empty. His costume was cool, though, but the vocals weren’t all there. They weren’t absolutely terrible, but they were nothing to write home about either. Overall, this has some potential for ESC, especially with the lack of rock songs this year, but I can’t see it doing much in the final.
The production here is somewhere on the level of Irish Eurosong. The camera constantly shakes and keeps making me feel dizzy and the audio mixing is really bad which makes him sound too loud in some parts and too quiet in others. The song itself is alright though, at least I enjoyed the chaos of this whole thing.
There’s something potentially not bad here, but the live performance does its best to hide any potential this has. She started off… fine, but progressively worse. The mixing was awful, sure, but a lot of these notes can’t be blamed on the mixing. She also looked very lost and aimless on stage.
Again, there’s a tiny bit of potential here, but it’s buried behind this godawful production. I think he did his best, all things considered, but the mixing made it impossible for me to hear them at all. You could barely make him out during the choruses, which were just an annoying stream of “ayayayayaya"s. I can’t say I enjoyed this.
This is probably fun, but it’s not like I could hear any of it because of the mixing or see the performance because of the lighting. I’ll give it some credit for being fun in parts where it wasn’t being actively ruined by the production though.
They must’ve finally figured out the mixing because this sounds noticeably better than every previous song. It’s a shame it highlights her poor vocals even more, especially near the end. But the song itself isn’t that bad in parts, though it is highly disjointed. With a revamp, this could actually be decent.
Here’s a classic example of a mismatched song and singer. The song is cool and mysterious, and his voice is cool, but they don’t fit together at all. Still, I could actually consider listening to this at some point in the future, so I’ll give it points for that.
I would almost call it not bad. Sure, it’s a very 2000s Disney Channel kind of rock, but I can vibe with it. I just wish the vocal performance was in any way convincing. Sure, a lot of it is on the mixing, but his stage presence isn’t interesting at all and fails to bring me any joy.
She’s good. He’s bad. Overall, it balances out to still being bad because he spoils it every time he opens his mouth. Still, 50% of the performers are good, which is something new for this NF. It’s a shame the bad 50% drag it down into the pits of hell.
This is so comically bad that I don’t even properly hate it. The performance is terrible from start to finish, but at least there’s something entertaining going on stage. But still, this is closer to something I’d expect to see in Moldova auditions.
This just goes on and on and on to the point where it felt like it’s been over 5 minutes long, not 3. But in isolation, it isn’t actually too bad I guess. The final part in Armenian is actually good and she mostly stayed on key, which puts her well above most other singers.
On the upside, this is a lot more tolerable than Chaisaw Chains on You. On the downside, it’s still cringe. The lyrics, man, the lyrics. They’re so bad. We’ve had many cringy lyrics already, but I will never get over these. The bridge actively offends me on an intellectual level. Apparently, this was supposed to be her 2021 entry before Armenia withdrew entirely, which really does explain everything.
Armenia should hire some foreign producers to help with NFs if they want to keep doing NFs because this was really bad. The lineup of songs wasn’t actually all atrocious. Sure, there weren’t any huge standouts, but it wasn’t an all-time bad selection. But it was basically impossible to enjoy anything on offer with the production quality.
For the interval acts, we had Aram MP3 (who also hosted this) perform Not Alone, then Malena performed some of her songs too and Brunette sang as well. It was a bit overlong for my tastes, but I didn’t mind it.
Now, the results were surprising. Athena didn’t win a single category, so you know what this means? My favourite won for the second time this season! How incredible!