The Wiwi Jury — our in-house panel of music unprofessionals — have journeyed to the beautiful city of Minsk to check out the 10 acts competing in Eurofest 2018. With the national final on February 16, each act is no doubt rehearsing to perfect their package.
The final entrant up for review is Alekseev with “Forever”. Will the famed Ukrainian sensation blow us away with his entry? Read on to find out!
Alekseev – “Forever”
“Forever” reviews
Antranig: Alekseev is an incredible singer capable of securing Belarus its best Eurovision result ever. But “Forever” — despite being a solid entry — is not the song capable of doing so. As such, it’s quite a relief knowing that this could be disqualified because Alekseev deserves a better song. Belarus needs him at Eurovision and hopefully they can concoct a song that better fits his talents.
Score: 7.5/10
Luis: Entries that create a buzz like “Forever” have a potential huge drawback: that they don’t live up to the expectations. This is a clear case. Alekseev has a very interesting voice, but his song is nothing new. “Forever” is an OK tune, but it fails to keep the atmosphere that it creates in the first minute. It’s monotonous, plus the lyrics are cliche and uninspired.
Score: 5/10
Natalie: Oh dear. I mean, is this a good song? Yeah, I guess it’s got a lot of emotion and power, albeit quite repetitive and obviously performed by an inflated ego. Would it win Eurovision? Possibly, it depends on the competition. But should it? No, of course not. Should it even be considered? Absolutely not. When a country has contestants literally refusing to compete because of rules being ignored and rigging, there’s something wrong.
Score: 2/10
Robyn: It looks like Alekseev might win the ticket to Lisbon on star power alone. It’s a shame because “Forever” isn’t the best song. The rule-compliant new version smoothed off all the interesting edges of the original and has made the song sound dreary instead of enchanting. But Alekseev is an experienced and popular performer and can latch onto the emotion of the song.
Score: 6.5/10
Sebastian: Putting all the drama of Alekseev’s song to one side, “Forever” is a slickly produced song, and we’d expect nothing less from the Ukrainian superstar. Compared to all other Belarusian entries, “Forever” scores well. However, compared to Alekseev’s discography and potential, “Forever” feels like a filler song on his back catalogue. If Alekseev does win Eurofest, here’s hoping he is forced to select a new entry so we can leave “Forever” forever in the past.
Score: 6.5/10
In our Eurofest Wiwi Jury, we have 11 jurors who made it to Minsk, but only room for 5 reviews. The rest of our scores can be found below:
Anthony: 7/10
Lukas: 7/10
Chris: 6/10
Barnabas: 7/10
Deban: 7.5/10
Jonathan: 7/10
Before calculating the average score, the highest and lowest scores are dropped. This is to remove outliers and reduce potential bias. We have removed a low of 2 and a high of 7.5.
Song 8/10
Voice 2/10 (he can’t sing live)
Performance 4/10
8*2 + 2 + 4 = 22
22 : 4 = 5.5/10.0
Personally, this is my favourite song in the national selection. I like it, it starts slowly and dark and the chorus gets lighter. It’s hard to find a good entry from Belarus through the years. However, I’m afraid EBU won’t let this compete so either it will be revamped or send another song.
Wish him best of luck!
8/10
Being Belarusian I would not like Alekseev to go to Eurovision. Whole story does not smell nice. And regarding the song itself, I would not listen to it twice.
Alekseev’s Backing vocalists for the national final (and if he wins, ESC 2018) are the tolmachevy sisters (Russia’s First JESC Winners)
which makes his song even more throwaway
The russian version (Navsegda) is better for me.
Navsegda – 10/10
Forever – 8/10
the tolmachevy sisters were also the backing vocalists for Navsegda.
I love it! It would be my 1st, but with revamp it would be my number 3 in my top(after France and Czech Republic). I love his styling too. The song feels modern, but kind of old-fashioned and I really like that. Anyway;
9/10
The infantile lyrics convey an atmosphere of pathological, obsessive, unhealthy love. The song’s subject clearly is a child mentally, who suffers from delusions of grandeur. In this sense, the entry creates a meta-narrative, as if it’s talking about itself. “I know I’m unremarkable, and I know I’m fake, and I know I don’t deserve it, but please love me for who I am”. Rain keeps on falling indeed, and this bitter sweet, hypnotic elegy serves more depth than we deserve.
This is incidentally mine and my cat’s new theme song.
Sis there’s no depth in it… just forced rhymes and limited English skills.
Seek help.
You posted a 7-line-long mindwank about a song with meaningless lyrics and I’m the one who should seek help lmao
Alekseev makes me dislike his attempt at winning Eurofest. The whole thing smells just wrong. But, I’ll try to review Forever objectively. The song itself is… fine. The melody is quite nice and adds a dash of mysticism. The lyrics are okay, although a bit cliche. The vocals are where it all falls apart. Alekseev is trying too much, sounds nasal and his English is not good.
6/10
Say no to corruption and incomprehensible English pronunciation and plagiarized songs.
A 5/10.
Sadly the low quality of songs has made it certain that this will win.
I personally love this song and Alekseev. it’s 9/10 from me
He is so overrated,hope won’t win!!
Natalie went IN. The song is bland, just like the performer, whose flat and nasal vocals aren’t pleasing at all. Plus, the fact that the music track is so weak makes this issue stand out even more. I guess they’ll send him because he’s famous in a couple of countries, but they should also consider that the rest of Europe has no idea who he is.
As much as I like “Forever”, the controversy surrounding its publication should really force Belarus to consider having the song replaced in the strong likelihood (okay, certain) that Alekseev wins Eurofest.
BUt either way, it’s still a well produced song for me and I can’t wait to see if the live performance can maximize it further.
Forever forgotten.
thank you wiwibloggs for being honest it is a filler song when sung in english it was magically when in sung in russian
I actually think this is a good song and Belarus have shown willingness to spend money on staging and production when it comes to actual Eurovision (money that they probably saved when staging their “national final”). In a year that Georgia are doing something weird, Russia are not going in it to win it and the Ukrainian jury is out of touch with what they need to be selecting, this could do really well with the Eastern European voting.