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CROATIA – Poison Cake – Marko Bošnjak
What you think of Denmark? Do you like Espain? You can ask without any reply. But what about Croatia – that’s a different matter! They’ll all reply: “It’s cakey, cakey, very very cakey, it’s very cakey!”
I might as well get that out of the way from the outset. British viewers over the age of 45 or so – and dear reader, I’ve been one of those for more than a fortnight now – will be humming the jingle from a 1980s commercial for a fibre-based breakfast cereal for the rest of the week after hearing this. As much as I’d like to imagine that some Croatian songwriters in the second half of 2024 fell down a YouTube rabbit hole and got inspired by it… they PROBABLY didn’t?
It was always going to be a challenge for Croatia to follow the success of Rim Tim Tagi Dim, but HRT clearly learned some lessons from it. Dora was fun, strong, varied and vibrant, and out of that that we’ve ended up with something pleasingly imaginative and self-confident to make the attempt.
Marko plays the role of the villain from a fairytale or Disney movie with aplomb, sometimes gleeful and sometimes genuinely unsettling, though at Dora the howls of fury in the denouement looked like they might have been a vocal leap too far for him. Not that we’ll get to see much of how he plays the rehearsals, but if he has any sense he’ll save his voice for when it matters on those.
As for the composition, it moves through the gears nicely and the various disparate pieces of song fit together without the gaffer tape being too visible. Genuflect has been a really underused word in pop music since the 1750s or so, and it’s particularly nice to see it getting an airing here.
I like it. Marko’s no Baby Lasagna and nobody’s pretending otherwise, but this’d be an asset to the final and I think it stands a decent chance of making it.
Nick’s score: 7