Alexander Rybak – Fairytale
He conquered Europe’s song contest – now he’s after their charts…
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[4.70]
Edward Okulicz: Okay, I’m listening to this objectively. I’m trying not to think of his stupid, stupid face while I do it. I swear. But it’s hard. What’s easy to see, though, is that at the level of performance, this is competent. It’s nicely done. The verses have a nice bounce to them and everything builds like it’s supposed to. But compositionally? Dull as dishwater, and that fiddle riff gets less magnetic with repeated listens. The folksly conversationals of the verses are cloying. The lyrics are rubbish – they are not evocative or interesting, and lines like “years ago, when I was younger” are cringeworthy in their pleonasm. Ear-catching at first, but the phrase “rapidly diminishing returns” was coined just for this. And he really needs a slap. Azerbaijan was robbed!
[3]
Doug Robertson: This won? How? I know UK managed to get a respectable — in much the same way that eating off a bin lid rather than the ground is respectable — 5th place which, if we were considered better than them, doesn’t say a lot for the other songs in the contest, but even so this is a terrible slice of eurofolk of the sort that people who dismiss the contest as a pointless cheesefest can hold up to support their argument. It must have had one hell of a performance.
[3]
Anthony Easton: It’s bad, and not even Eurovision bad. I miss the high-meta, the self aware weirdness that these new judging criteria seem to have killed. Plus his falsetto is painful.
[4]
Martin Skidmore: It was clear during Eurovision that I liked this more than most of my colleagues. I like the fiddle very much, he has a bright and lively voice, there’s a catchy enough tune – I was surprised at the magnitude of the victory, but it was among my favourites on the night. He doesn’t deal with the chorus terribly well, his voice all but overwhelmed by the rest of the sound, but otherwise this is a likeable record.
[7]
Chuck Eddy: Would’ve worked better to trinken das bier to if it had either stayed a slow pretty oompah to assist teardrops or turned way more hardy and rousing, to enable robust clanking of steins together. As is, it’s wet strudel (plus yeah, I know, Norwegian not German), though I’m eager to learn which Northern European pagan folk-forest-metal band will be first with the inevitable cover version (hoping Korpiklaani; their Finnish humpa beat would totally kill on this).
[4]
Frank Kogan: Fiddle kicks absolute butt, followed by a sweetly pale Minskian singing a sweetly negligible melody, then the fiddle returns and slams this home.
[8]
Iain Mew: Those strings are great and the chorus isn’t exactly original but could easily be a thing of dramatic glory if properly belted out. Alexander really isn’t up to it though, and worse turns the already dodgy verses into plodding momentum-killers, sung with enunciation as a priority above meaning or emotion. There are just enough stylistic similarities that I keep imagining Patrick Wolf turning this into something much better.
[4]
Dave Moore: Heavy fiddle-driven piano mash polka gives way to an airy pizzicato verse, then splits the difference on the chorus. Rybak’s voice is passable, the lyrics unremarkable, the fiddlin’ neither more nor less gimmicky than B*Witched’s, the superfluous “da da da’s” still welcome. Considering this presumably started life as some kinda “fiddle jam” (shudder), it’s surprisingly agreeable.
[7]
Martin Kavka: Rybak waxes nostalgic for a past love, even though “every day we started fighting / every night we fell in love.” This assumes that love can only bloom when women are silent in a relationship — or, at best, simply moaning. Decades of pop, and people still endorse songs in which women are merely sexual objects for men. (Or is there a lost verse with the line, “Every night, when we did crossword puzzles together, I was amazed by her capacious intellect”?) As a result of an embarrassment of this magnitude, Europe loses all its right to complain about American imperialism. Hopefully, we’ll have better klezmerpop in the future.
[1]
Ian Mathers: Oh, Eurovision. Never change.
[6]
At least it’s better than Lloyd Webber’s, possibly the worst song to have come from the UK this decade (you can’t name a taller feat).
Lloyd Webber’s flatulent C- musical theatre number was _loads_ better than Scooch and Daz (sorry Mr Ewing) and Jemini, probably about as good as Javine, slightly better than Mr Fox and his blue hospital jacket.. and that’s not even counting non-Eurovision songs it was better than.
(Best UK entry of last 10 years = Jessica Garlick)
Then again, I thought Finland had the best tune and they came last and needed jury intervention to even escape the semis so what do I know? (Nothing!)
“years ago, when I was younger” means something different from just “years ago” – it’s not just saying that it’s in the past, it’s drawing your attention to the idea that the singer was a different person then. Nothing wrong with that at all.
I agree that “years ago” and “when I was younger” mean two different things. But I think “years ago when I was younger” means the same thing NOT as “years ago”, but the same as “when I was younger”. At any rate it’s still wide-eyed and try-hardish. Perhaps he’s aspiring to something like Paul Simon’s lyric:
“Now the years are rolling by me
They are rocking evenly
And I am older than I once was
And younger than I’ll be”
To be fair, it comes across a lot better without the missed bow-miming and his eyebrows. But still can’t see where the groundswell of love came from voters OR jury.