Estonia 2018 - Evestus - Welcome To My World

(Click here to see a mediocre band trying a bit hard to be bonkers...)

While it's lovely that you're constantly dropping us your little hints and tips from around the strange creases of the national qualifiers of Europe, every now and again you get us quite wrong. For example, the Apocalypse mailbox has been full of links to this clip, suggesting that it's right up my street. But in this instance you couldn't be more mistaken. For this performance is absolutely terrible - and not for the reasons that you might think.

When I first heard that Evestus were having a pop at this year's Laul I was mildly amused. For years they've been the kind of third division techno goth band who you frequently see playing the third stage of a small-town Belgian Industrial Noise Fest. On a Sunday. Afternoon. They've always had the odd good song in them - hunt down the video for their horror jungle beatdown The Fall to see what they're fully capable of. But more often than not they just churn out the tired old tropes of the genre without offering anything terribly new or exiting - the Shed Seven of their respective scene, if you will.

But even we weren't quite prepared for quite how low they'd stoop in their attempt to tread the Eurovision boards. Where at best they can chug along a pretty hefty techno electro groove, here they just plod along listlessly, coming over like a car boot Marilyn Manson when he was on his terrible middle period. And then there's the other clear lifts. You thought that keyboard-on-a-spring thing looked cool? So did Nine Inch Nails when they pioneered it 20-odd years ago. And how about those ambiguous backing singers? Very reminiscent of pretty much any gig Ministry or The Revolting Cocks or even Pigface did in the nineties. Then there's the collapsing stage schtick that crops up in about one in five of the videos of this genre. And even the singer looks like a smart price Dani Filth in his half-arsed menace.

Now some, if not all, of these references might leave you a little puzzled, like we're making up our own language or something. But trust us, we're well versed in this field, and this mob aren't especially very good at it. I mean, how bored did that drummer lad look. He was clearly wondering about which pie he wanted to polish off once he'd got back to his mum's after the show and raided her fridge.

Add this as another to the long sorry list of reasonably decent genre bands who wimp out and deliver a deeply watered down song for Eurovision that's more what they think people will like than one that they're actually any good at doing. Gothminister, Nuteki, Kabat et al, come on down. But what's more worrying is that they've bagged the last-song-in-the-draw slot at the Laul final, which means they'll be able to pull off something pretty big and explosive looking, which would put them in real contention for the gong. Oh good lord, please no...