After sitting out a year in 2021 Armenia returns with a song so devoid of any national flavour I had to Google whether the artist herself had any connection to the country. She does, and is Armenian through and through, albeit working professionally under a more international-sounding version of her real name and with a very international group of songwriters.
There’s a hint of US country sound to this guitar-led ballad, a sound I think suits it very well. It’s a fragile, vulnerable exploration of the mental health impact of a break-up (a theme we’ll return to plenty of times this year). Rosa is implored to snap out of it, and muses if only it were that easy. She tries snapping her fingers as part of an incantation to banish her former lover but warns that without success her own stability might be the thing to snap itself.
It’s a clever framing of an age-old theme, and in the video, she depicts being able to escape by fixing up her wintery dacha with wings to fly off from the foundations tethering it to her despair and over the city, landing her in a place of new opportunities and fresh starts. Or Yerevan’s main square, at least.
I get the feeling so many artists have been working on their songs in the midst of the hardest impacts of Covid, and whilst not all of them address the pandemic directly there’s a running theme of using songs as therapy to process emotion heightened by these most difficult of times. This is all well and good, until you turn up to enter your handiwork into a competition and find out so many of your fellow competitors have been doing the same thing. Now we have to judge one against the other it’s hard to see how each will stand out without eye-catching staging, which we’ll have to wait until May to see. Get that right and this could be a sleeper.
My marks: 7 points
Photo credit: Robert Koloyan