Thursday 28 January 2016

UK 2016 - Alexandra Chaloner - Danger With Stranger


Regular readers may be familiar with my fascination the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a neurological tic whereby people of a relatively low skillset misinterpret their own abilities as being of a much higher worth than they actually are. You know, the kind of people you see on the earliest stages of the casting shows who are are convinced they are the next Mariah Carey, can barely mumble their way through a tune, but are convinced that they are hard done by when Simon tries to be as polite and unpatronising as he can be in the rejection comments at the end. Well I suspect that there's a little of that going on here.

From the very intro comments at the start of the video - "The one the BBC missed" and affirmations that it "could have won the Eurovision Song Contest" - you suspect that you're in for a wonky treat. And you won't be wrong.

From the confused, garbled lyric, the speak-sung vocals in a register far too low for the song, and the simple, home made-looking video, we started to convince ourselves that it must be some sweet-but-inept Moldovan bedroom act hoping to make an impact on the British music scene. But we were dumbfounded when it reached the end (and the last line of the song is an absolute killer, we warn you!), and the credits revealed a not insubstantial cast list of very serious looking people from High Wycombe who all took part in the production of this stunning artefact. Cripes.

Seriously, stick with this from start to end, because even if the song rambles on a bit, the many treats on view are wonders to behold!

2 comments:

  1. I had this rather melancholy thought while watching this: The only problem here is the spectacularly incompetent arrangement, in a key that few non-smoking female singers could possibly navigate. True, there's a lot of other things wrong with it, but nothing we haven't seen before in many a Grand Final.

    Sic a Swedish arranger on it, get a toothy soprano to belt it out in a key that's in her range, hire a few modern dancers to flail around behind her in gauzy white windblown outfits, and I could see this being a contender in, say, Serbia.

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  2. This song with a decent arrangement would probably turn into "Taken by a Stranger".

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