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Aww, Albania next, with Elhaida Dani singing I’m Alive. This is at the lower level of my middle songs that I don’t mind. It’s really nothing special for me and I think the staging doesn’t do much to give it more welly.
That’s based on the rehearsal footage from Vienna, rather than the televised performance: Albania’s first semi-final was still to come on 19 May. The presentation is deliberately fairly gimmick-free, with Elhaida in a black outfit and short glittering cape, three female backing vocalists, dark staging, warm gold lighting and abstract, shattered-glass-style graphics. Elegant, perhaps, but not exactly the sort of thing that leaps out and grabs you by the ears.
Elhaida looks pretty though, and not unlike Caroline Flack for those of you familiar with the UK TV presenter.
The vocal is strong, although there were a few shaky moments in the rehearsal coverage, and I just fail to see how this will be enough people’s favourite song. Elhaida had won The Voice of Italy in 2013, so the vocal ability is certainly not coming from nowhere. She had also originally won Albania’s Festivali i Këngës 53 with a different song, “Diell”, before that entry was withdrawn and replaced by the English-language “I’m Alive”.
Retrospectively: Albania qualified from the first semi-final in tenth place with 62 points, but finished 17th in the grand final with 34 points. So my suspicion that the song might struggle to become a favourite was not entirely misplaced, even if Elhaida’s voice was never really the problem.
