Thursday 2 February 2017

Belarus 2017 – Nikita Hodas – Voices In My Head

(Click here for a diverting yet minimal three minutes…)


This shouldn't work. A lone, doe-eyed boy with murderous eyes singing a song in a fractured voice about the voices in his head while clutching an unspecified book? In normal circumstances this would be the point at which you quietly call the police.

But heavens, no more than 20 seconds in you suddenly realise that you’ve been intently staring at the screen and hanging on his every minimal move. It even looks like it’s going to get a bit silly when the lights come up and we can see the singing waiting staff warbling in the wings, but no. Instead it drifts along with an innocent but intelligent charm, and you can’t help but love the thing by it’s eventual fading out. 

These are the kinds of songs that from audio alone you wonder why they ever got as far as the first audition stage. But there was something so beautifully fragile and off-kilter about the live performance that you can see exactly why it got there. The right song might have won in Belarus for a change, but I'd have loved for this to have done well in the polls too.

2 comments:

  1. I thought it might be "Eurovision For Dummies", given it is yellow and appears to have black writing on the cover... ;)

    I think we would be already getting 'ballad overkill' if this had gone to Kyiv instead of Naviband...

    ReplyDelete
  2. He's really good and it was actually clear that he understands what he's singing about. I think he could be a really strong voice in the Belorussian music scene. I think he's not yet ready for ESC but I really really liked this.

    ReplyDelete