Swedish~ Stereo~

Keeping this year Melodifestivalen tendence to give win in semifinal to preliminary favorites strongly beloved by many Eurovision fans Eric Saade today has got victory in Linköping with his big show and Fredrik Kempe's song "Popular". Unfortunately I haven't fallen for this song and think that Fredrik with Eric are able for much stronger stuff but there were too much of strengths, preparations and sources in this performance so expectedly it was rewarded by public votes. The Playtones have got another ticket with song "The King" also by Fredrik Kempe and I consider it as breakthrough, I'm not a fan of rockabilly but there was pretty a lot of natural drive in this song and performance was colourul, not trivial and confident. Sara Varga (unfortunately I also couldn't fall for her song) along with Shirley's Angels has got ticket to Second Chance. Angels have given as much as it was expected from the biggest professional veterans of MF working in schlager-bubble many years, and it looked much more effective than during rehearsal with girls making some unbelievable active choreography never losing breath or hitting the wrong note. I consider this project as something made just for MF as I don't actually see people buying classic schlagers of Shirley under new name but for MF it was brilliant comeback. On the other hand Sebastian looked more like artist showing new concept what he was currently about outside MF with stylish but static performance and more radio than competition song, he was left 5th. Linda Sundblad with her lovely performance and my personal favorite song of this semifinal was 6th, stunning looking Sara Lumholdt with again really good modern song but maybe again too radio-friendly than for MF was 7th and Simon Forsberg with beautiful ballad sounding like male "För att du finns" - only 8th. However I've got a strong feeling that Simon's song is gonna get heavy rotation on Swedish radio this year, song is really beautiful but this year people don't vote for traditional ballads so we'll see.
Diamond of this evening was schlager-icon Lena Philipsson singing her new single "Idiot" and English rock-version of "Dansa i Neon" - "Dancing in the Neon Light" with Dead By April, really wow-moment of two big professional acts joining forces to outshine whole semifinal, this song is released as single on iTunes (with instrumental as b-side) as all not qualified songs (only Sebastian's single has b-sides - instrumental and singback version), you can watch covers of Linda Sundblad, Lena and Sara Lumholdt which I didn't show you before above.