With the extravaganza of Melodifestivalen fast becoming a memory and only a few countries left to announce their entries for Malmö, it should have been a fairly quiet week on the Eurovision front, right? Fortunately we know better than that, and here’s esc-chat.com’s review of all the news and gossip from the last seven days!

Monday began with the continued fall-out from the previous day’s revelation – or realisation, really, since it had been in the rules for some time – that each country’s points will be calculated differently this year, with the jury and televote’s entire ranking being taken into consideration. The new procedure is summed up nicely within Daniel from Sofabet’s piece on the Dutch entry here – check out the comments thread for some extra analysis. While it remains to be seen what effect this change has on the results at the contest proper, a lack of precedent certainly makes things more difficult for the gamblers and predictors among us!

Ah yes, the Dutch song. We already had a good idea of what Anouk’s “Birds” would sound like based on concert clips, telephone conversations and various other snippets, but on Monday the song was presented officially. It met with a broadly positive response from the fans, and many will be crossing their fingers and toes that the Netherlands can reach the Saturday night final for the first time since 2004 regardless of whether they actually like the song or not.

A new, more dynamic (we think that means “louder”) version of the Ukrainian entry “Gravity” was also revealed on Monday. Meanwhile, over in Bulgaria, Elitsa and Stoyan stamped their feet hard enough and forced broadcaster BNT to announce “Samo shampioni” as the nation’s 2013 ESC entry after all, thereby overturning the results of its own telephone and jury vote. The official reason stated was contractual issues involving the songwriter of the legitimate winner, “Kismet” – but given the shambolic end to the national final broadcast and the comments emanating from Elitsa and Stoyan’s camp in the immediate aftermath, we can’t imagine they expect many people to believe that.

It was a week for new versions, as Tuesday saw the release of the revamped Belgian entry, “Love Kills” by Roberto Bellarosa. The song certainly comes across much stronger than it did during its original presentation in a Sunday morning radio studio, but that’s hardly surprising! Roberto still seems a little shy and awkward in the video, but in a semi-final of just 16 entries, it might yet be time for French-language broadcaster RTBF to finally have a Saturday night representative for the first time since Urban Trad’s “Sanomi”.

Swedish broadcaster SVT released the full results of Melodifestivalen 2013 on Tuesday. Unlike in some previous years, however, there were no great surprises or shocks to be had. Perhaps the most interesting titbit was that eventual winner Robin Stjernberg only just squeezed through his Andra Chansen duel with Martin Rolinski, with “You” taking the victory by fewer than 3,000 votes. Things might have looked very different otherwise – it’s hard to imagine Rolinski winning the final, so would that have opened the door for the other “teen boy” entries from Ulrik Munther and Anton Ewald, or would Yohio have simply walked away with it? (We like to think there would have been a last-minute intervention from Christer Björkman and this heavy metal cover version of “You” would have been allowed to compete instead.)

Speaking of the rockier end of the musical spectrum, Albania presented the three-minute Eurovision version of its entry “Identitet” on Tuesday. The annual wait to see how the country will shorten and restyle the Festivali i Këngës winner has been a fun tradition ever since Anjeza Shahini first appeared on the Eurovision radar with “Imazhi yt” shortly before Christmas 2003, and we reckon they’ve done another decent job this year – plus the video is quite cool, too.

And Tuesday night ended with the first of two semi-finals in Moldova, in which seven lucky qualifiers made it through to Saturday night’s grand final. As the TRM website put it (via Google Translate), “The show is a true fairy lights, something impressive that you can see on Tuesday night at 20:00, only on Moldova 1.” Hard to disagree there.

Wednesday began with the truly disturbing news that designer Julien Macdonald will be responsible for Bonnie Tyler’s outfit and styling in Malmö. Viewers of Britain & Ireland’s Next Top Model will be well aware that Macdonald’s taste often tends to the… unusual. Here’s hoping Bonnie ends up in a sensible, if designer, look – and not something like this.

The day continued with the presentation of a one-minute teaser of France’s entry on a newspaper website – the French do like a bit of teasing – before the song was released properly on Spotify. Unfortunately, it was only available on French Spotify, leading to confusion and anguish among the fan community during the long, agonising hours they had to wait for someone to upload it to YouTube. Amandine Bourgeois later turned up on French TV to deliver a live performance of what is certainly one of this year’s more unusual entries:

Thursday was a busy day. As well as the second show of true fairy lights in Moldova, there was a national final in Azerbaijan – and after some confusion as to the exact format of the show, it really was a standard-issue national final in the end, with ten singers performing ten songs and the winner getting the ticket to Sweden. It was probably no great surprise when that ticket was given to Farid Mammadov, who had already presented his entry “Hold Me” on another popular TV show in Azerbaijan – but the song is another strong entry from the Caucasian nation, and the only real question is how well they actually want to do this year. You can read our report on the final here.

The Montenegrin entry, “Igranka” by Who See, was also presented in a brief television show on Thursday night. Both the song and the accompanying video can be described as quite different from your average ESC fare – but Montenegro has rarely sent anything as “in your face” as this to the contest, regardless of the quality of the underlying entry. “Igranka” will surely go down well on the EuroClub dancefloor, anyway, but the nagging suspicion remains that it could be a brilliant car crash on stage. We kind of hope so – but it’d be lovely to see the Montenegrin flag on the Saturday night scoreboard too!

Of course, the biggest news of all on Thursday was the resolution of the story otherwise known as “How do you solve a problem like Heilsarmee?”. As reported extensively – including by us – the Swiss representatives had previously been ordered by the EBU to change their band name and wear costumes that were not obviously Salvation Army uniforms. What they’ll be wearing in Malmö remains to be seen, but the new name for Heilsarmee is officially… Takasa.

Apparently, “Takasa” is the Swahili word for “purify” – so in the spirit of mutual understanding, we hope Petra Mede’s script for ESC 2013 will take inspiration from the last time Sweden hosted the contest:

It was quickly noted that “Takasa” could also stand for “The Artists Known As Salvation Army” – and when this point was put to the band by the Swiss media, they coyly replied that they weren’t going to dispute any alternative interpretations. Which is fair enough, really – they were asked to choose a different name and have done so, and it would have been unreasonable to expect them not to refer back to their roots in some way. Takasa also demonstrate an impressive ability to defy the laws of physics by squeezing into a tiny car in their official preview video.

Names, uniforms and automobiles aside, we just hope the guitarist is still planning to show off his own unique interpretation of the rock star attitude in May:

Some people had unofficially dubbed Friday as “Valentina Monetta Day”, although we rather suspect every day is Valetina Monetta Day in San Marino. In any case, the tiny mountain state presented its entry for the 2013 contest, which sees the 38-year-old performer of last year’s “Social Network Song” leaving behind childish things and giving her best on a far more sensible Ralph Siegel song. Well, songs.

Sensible is a word that has been missing from the Macedonian selection process for ESC 2013, and the saga continued on Friday with the presentation of “Pred da se razdeni”, the Lozano & Esma song that is supposed to replace the controversial “Imperija”. Maybe it’s just low expectations, but the official reveal of the new entry was immediately followed by rumours that the singers were deeply unhappy with it, that they preferred “Imperija” after all and that Macedonian TV might yet return to the original plan. The truth of the matter is that nobody really knows the truth of the matter – but until further notice, “Pred da se razdeni” is the song that will represent the Balkan nation in Sweden. (We do hope there’s still time for some rumours involving Despoina Olympiou, though.)

After so many hectic weekends during this year’s national final season, it was almost a relief that Saturday night featured just one show, the Moldovan final. Despite a field of 14 participants, there were two clear favourites with the televoters: Boris Covali and Aliona Moon. The latter was voted second-best by the public but won the jury vote, and will duly proceed to ESC 2013 (you can read our report here). Aliona will be accompanied on stage by composer Pasha Parfeny, which is fortunate, as we’ve never seen before how looks his piano.

And so the 2013 national final season draws to a close – hasn’t it been fun? Lengthy, exhausting fun… The weeks ahead promise to be no less eventful, anyway, starting with tomorrow’s Heads of Delegation meeting and going all the way up to the two weeks of Eurovision madness in early May. So be sure to keep an eye on this site and our Twitter and Facebook accounts for all the latest news!