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  • Eurovision 2012 Update: Malta! “This Is the Night!”

    Eurovision 2012 Update: Malta! “This Is the Night!”

    Eurovision – Baku 2012 ''Light Your Fire''
    It’s February, and that means the annual Eurovision Song Contest is starting to take shape. This year’s theme is “Light Your Fire” and the finals will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan, a historic city on the coast of the Caspian Sea, and home to Ell & Nikki, the duo whose song “Running Scared” won Eurovision last year.

    Each year around this time, various member countries of the European Broadcasting Union start picking their entries in the song competition which is notable for its spectacle of musical cheddar. This is, after all, the contest that established artists like ABBA and Celine Dion as international stars, and whose very aesthetic has been central to Lady Gaga’s schtick (her 2011 album Born This Way is pretty much a self contained Eurovision competition).

    Most of the participating countries have nominating contests to choose their entries, so if you weren’t busy watching the bafflement over Rick Santorum’s surge in the Republican primaries this week, you might have noticed that the tiny island nation of Malta selected their Eurovision representative: audience favorite Kurt Calleja (rocking a Ricky Martin-style 10-day shadow) and the song “This Is the Night,” a catchy if generic chunk of Eurodisco candy. This is the 22-year-old Malta native’s third attempt at winning the chance to represent his home country at Eurovision. “This Is the Night” is a hard song not to like, but it’s good that Mr. Calleja has a few months to polish up his act – which is embarrassingly rough in spots, especially on the ad-libs in the final choruses:

  • The Wanted Came Adorable on Chelsea Lately

    The Wanted Came Adorable on Chelsea Lately

    The Wanted's Surprise U.S. Hit
    It’s been a full decade since the end of the last great wave of boy bands, and even then, the most successful of the bunch were of the American variety. So the sudden cross-Atlantic success of British quintet The Wanted with their song “Glad You Came” (which surged into Billboard’s Top 40 Pop Chart a couple weeks ago) feels unlikely and deliciously random. Why, then, a guy might fairly ask, haven’t superior recent singles by JLS or One Direction similarly stormed our airwaves?

    Maybe The Wanted are just really cute, sweet guys – even by boy band standards?

    Last night, fresh from a tour date in Las Vegas and en route to more dates in Canada and then back to the U.K., the group made their American “late night debut” on Chelsea Lately, all five of them piled up onto Chelsea Handler’s guest couch fielding questions about, y’know, their British accents and whether they are “of age”. The group came across wide-eyed and friggin’ adorable – in stark contrast to the residual tackiness of Chelsea’s show (I’m kind of a fan). When Chelsea told 18-year-old Nathan he looked a little like Justin Bieber, he blushingly replied “if someone did something horrible to his face, possibly.” O. M. G. So damn cute.

    “Glad You Came”, which debuted at the top of the UK singles chart last summer, is the lead single from the band’s sophomore album Battleground. The single’s available for download here, but neither Battleground, nor the group’s 2010 self-titled debut have gotten a U.S. release yet. Sadface. Get happy! Watch the video:

  • New Single! K’Naan “Is Anybody Out There” featuring Nelly Furtado

    K'Naan's New EP ''More Beautiful Than Silence''
    It’s hard to believe that it’s been a full three years since Somali-Canadian rapper Keinan Abdi Warsame – that’s K’Naan to jus’ us folks – released his third studio album The Troubadour and scored a surprise international sleeper hit in the song “Wavin’ Flag”. His autobiographical anthem of growing up in wartorn Mogadishu has had several lives in the last three years. Originally a Top 10 hit in Canada, the song got a snazzy new remix in late 2009 featuring a new Spanish language verse sung by Spanish pop hunk David Bisbal for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. For the Euro dance clubs, David Guetta and will.i.am took a shot at the song as well, and then, following the earthquake in Haiti, the song was turned into a all-star Canadian “We Are the World”-type charity single.

    It’s all enough to make a guy wonder how an artist can possibly follow up a hit song that, almost in affirmation its own chorus – “and then it goes back, and then it goes back, and then it goes back” – never really seems to go away. Even just a couple months ago, the song got the a capella treatment on NBC’s The Sing Off. And it’s not as if K’Naan didn’t try. He released several more singles from The Troubadour following “Wavin’ Flag” – songs like “Take a Minute” which also hit the Canadian Top 20 but still got swallowed up in its predecessor’s shadow.

    K’Naan’s back with a new 5-song EP called More Beautiful Than Silence. From that EP comes this collaboration with Nelly Furtado called “Is Anybody Out There?” A lyrics video for the song has been posted to the youtubes. Play it once and you’ll never get it out of your head: