Surprise! It’s Niall here to continue our review of the Benidorm Fest 2024 qualifiers! Now, I start with an apology and that is that I am sorry to say I’m not quite as funny as my good friend Tomas (you can read what he had to say about the Semi Final 1 qualifiers here) but I will still try to keep you entertained! Lets get things started!
St. Pedro – Dos Extraños (Cuarteto de Cuerda)
Okay, I have start off by saying that if St. Pedro wanted to hand me that rose then I would not complain. What a handsome chap.
We’re starting off fairly laid back here, with some decent vocals. Unfortunately this song doesn’t seem to go anywhere and it seems pretty disjointed from its staging. The dancers felt like they were doing far too much for such a simple song. The song is nice, but that’s about all I can say about it I’m afraid.
I hope we get some more energy from the next qualifiers…
María Peláe – Remitente
Okay we’ll get to energy in a moment but Spain! Oh my god! What are you trying to do to us here with these men!?! I almost forgot to listen to the song! Caliente!
Look past the rippling six packs, and there is a nice beat to this entry from María. That traditional Spanish flair was enjoyable, but did feel a tiny bit dated. But wow, powerful vocals all the way through too! This definitely gave a little crank to the energy dial compared to St. Pedro, but we can still take it higher I’m sure.
I don’t claim to know what any of this staging is representing, but it certainly was something/enjoyable, did I mention the men? I will fully admit that this had me doing a little sit down shoulder shimmy.
Jorge González – Caliente
Did I exclaim caliente too early? It seems like it! Benidorm Fest clearly knows its audience and decided to give us gays everything we could want and then some. I’m not religious but I feel like I may need to go to confession after witnessing that.
Okay, sorry, let me cool off… right, I feel better now.
First off all lets talk about this staging; choreo, dance breaks, pyro… so much going on and whilst it was fun to watch, the full performance just fell a little flat.
I saw someone on Twitter call this “a less camp, less fun Hola Mi Bebe” and they might be right. Despite the big stage show, the vocal struggles and there’s a lack of power behind the music in my opinon. There’s definitely room for some improvement if this wins the Malmö ticket.
Almácor – Brillos Platinos
I’ll be honest, I found this the most fun out of our 4 qualifiers. It felt pretty current and I could imagine this would do okay if it represented Spain in Malmö.
However it’s not without its problems. Almácor definitely had issues with his vocal, it sounded like how I would like to think I’d sound at karaoke (in reality I’m much, much worse) but there was something a little amateurish coming through in this performance for me.
Now for the staging, I imagine if you were seeing this live in the hall it seemed fairly simple but ultimately fun. For the audience at home however, what in the CGI was this? Firstly, I don’t know how they got it to work so well, was he secretly wearing one of those green morphsuits to allow the animations to track him? It was, however, all just a bit overwhelming on screen – too many different animations all at the same time. This type of effect just distracts from the song, lets leave this to the professionals (Poland) in future please?
Overall, I’m not fully convinced with any of these songs in their current state, certainly some revamps and rethinks are required, but they aren’t necessarily bad. These four join the qualifiers from Tuesday night and we’ll see them in the final tomorrow where one will be crowned the winner – but who do you think it should be? Let us know in the comments and on Twitter and Instagram @niallpointsblog.
We’ve got more content coming your way, including the final 2 videos from our UMK series – plus it’s a mammoth Super Saturday tomorrow (including Vidbir, the MGP final, the return of Melfest and much more), we’ll try and keep up with as much as we can!
