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ISRAEL – New Day Will Rise – Yuval Raphael
A recurring theme of the contest this year is double entendre. The Milkshake Man is neither meaning exactly what he says nor saying exactly what he means, and we’ll come to somebody a bit later on who knows – explicitly – I mean, EXPLICITLY – what she wants to say, but has – equally explicitly – been told not to. That may well be the most hyphens I’ve ever put into a sentence and it may well have been slightly too many hyphens.
In an entirely different way, New Day Will Rise potentially also isn’t explicitly saying precisely what it has in mind. The message isn’t especially hard to decipher though, especially if you’ve spent 5 seconds watching a rolling news channel in the last 18 months or so. The desire for a peaceful future is likely sincere, and the method of finding it is left as an exercise for the listener.
Still, I’ve always been a naturally suspicious type and if there are coded messages in here somewhere, it abides by the letter of the rules of the contest and has been ruled accordingly. We’re left to judge it as three minutes of popular music.
And… well, as three minutes of popular music, it isn’t all that great. Yuval, as far as I can tell, is a perfectly adequate performer, but lyrically it’s a stream of clichés, so short of ideas that all it can do to fill the time is to copy and paste them into a different language.
Musically we’re faced with a dull and dated ballad in – is it waltz time, I pretend to be a music critic so I should know this? – that could easily have come 7th in an Israeli national final of the 1980s or 9th for Belgium in a contest of the 1970s. Would anyone have even noticed this song was present if it was representing Croatia or Ireland? I doubt it.
As I said about Greece a few days ago, this will likely find a receptive audience somewhere, but I don’t really see how it’s going to catch on with too many floating voters and it’s not giving me anything much to latch onto. Not a favourite.
Nick’s score: 3
