What can be more fun than multitasking blogging and trying to fix technical errors? Pretty much nothing. Except sitting through a stretch of rehearsals which includes Moldova.

Armenia
They have changed some of the backdrops and added some screen effects of a breaking glass, but it makes little difference: She’s a great singer and the juries should love her, but she is essentially standing in the dark, making angry faces and yelling at the audience while not being particularly easy to understand and without much of a musical hook (and this comes from someone who likes the song). Not entirely sure what they were trying to achieve with this and why they felt there’s no need to try harder.

Also: I was asked after her first runthrough whether there were backing singers and this presentation is so empty that my memory told me there wasn’t. I was wrong, and there definitely many backing vocals coming up for the last section. It actually looks weird because the stage is so empty.

Ireland
It’s nice. It’s really really nice. I also couldn’t remember what came after Armenia by the time Latvia started, which always was the problem of this. It’s cheerful and cute and happy and it makes you smile and there’s no way to remember it despite that memorable floating shot from the ceiling. Some songs are just wrong for the competition even if there’s nothing actively bad to say about them.

Moldova
It’s still sand lady. They still have no idea what the point of the gimmick is or what the song is about. Next.

Switzerland
He sounded better today and it’s still as slick as it can be, which is actually a bit overly slick, because it actually has no character despite being visually fairly pleasing. They could have at least made it more visually pleasing if they used more colors than just the red as the dominant one – it often ends up swallowing them and also feeling a bit too violent in that context. It’s also quite hard to register anything about Luca as a performer – it’s a very cookie cutter template performance. It’s strong because it looks very professional and very current, but it lacks identity.

Latvia
Much like the first runs, Latvia’s nod to the 1999 stage (hey, they didn’t get to participate so they’re making up for lost time) is very warm and intimate, and does exactly what it should be doing. Bottom line still stands: if that’s your thing, you’ll like it, if it’s not, you’ll be bored to death. It just depends on how many people are in each group.