Lithuania 2013 - Gerai Gerai & Miss Sheep - War In The Wardrobe

There are some countries that you'd fancy going to visit on the basis of their failed Eurovision contenders alone, and for me Lithuania has always been one of them.

Take this slightly bonkers piece of Baltic electropop. It lilts along insistently in a nicely 90s kind of way, with a gently unhinged lyric and a moderately not-quite doolally dance routine and it makes you smile, quite calmly and happily.

It's nothing to get your gran excited, but it's got enough interesting little difference nodules to make you want to hear it again.

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Lithuania 2013 - Timohi - Time For Life

Now we're talking! After all that amateurish Swiss cobblers, our mates in Lithuania have finally kicked the live shows off with proper Eurovisionistic gusto. And this here is all you want…

A couple of jocular skinheads in regional fabrics and homemade instruments bouncing out a happy-go-lucky little folk pop gem? Perfect!

It did take us a fair while to realise it was being sung in English, mind…

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Switzerland 2013 - Marcello Alexander – Im Hotel Mama

When I first started watching this clip, I thought that it was most probably some kind of Swiss in joke, featuring some locally well-known comic setting himself up for some jolly jape at the end. But the more I watched, the more I realised how completely straight, and completely brilliant it was.

From the barrel-chested singer and his independently moving hair, to the old folks digging his singalong sounds and the unfeasibly fast-flowing torrent in the background, this clip is near perfect. How sad that it will almost certainly be going nowhere near the Swiss final.

I'm always hearing the fanboys wittering on about how songs should more closely represent their nation - well how much more Swiss can you possibly get than this?!

Videos from YouTube. Underlying © lays with the owners of the clips.