Albania

Carry Me In Your Dreams Kejsi Tola

"No strings attached..."

Whatever else Eurovision may give us, it all comes back to uncomplicated pop in the end. Countries can deliver complex anthems and multi-layered orchestration and lyrics as meaningful as some of the greatest poetry, but at some point they will recall and return to what the contest, at its core, is all about: upbeat, uptempo, straightforward songs that conform to certain criteria and are completely transparent. One country to have come full circle in this respect is Albania, who are returning to their pop roots in Moscow with Kejsi Tola's Carry Me In Your Dreams. Having cracked the top ten on debut with the similarly styled The Image Of You, they will be hoping that their restoration of Eurofabulousness takes them there once again after their wholly worthy but less successful intervening entries failed to do so, or failed to get them very far when they did.

I suspect, however, that composer Edmond Zhulali and lyricist June Muftaraj ('Mufty'?) Taylor - the same team behind Anjeza Shahini and Albania's first outing to the contest - will come away disappointed. While there's nothing wrong with Carry Me In Your Dreams, the fact that it comes fully labelled and does what it says on the tin may not be enough to sell it to the audience or the juries in a semi-final which is already hard enough to qualify from. It's destined to pick up points here and there, but I doubt it will collect enough of them to make it on its own, and the ingenuousness of the composition (in which the Albanian bagpipes seem more of an afterthought than ever before) suggests it is unlikely to win the support of any jury scoring it on depth and complexity. And in that case there'll only be one person who can change their minds: Ms Tola herself.

Unfortunately, where Kejsi is concerned it's very much a case of 'Jan Brady sings for Albania'. She has a fantastic voice for someone her age, but it's her age that's the problem: Festival i Këngës showed that while more than capable of belting out the song, she has no stage presence whatsoever. This was underscored in the preview video, in which she makes turning on the spot look like an exercise in applied mechanics. She is the quintessential ungainly teenager; one with killer vocals, sure, but however excited RTSH are getting about their Greek choreographer, there's only so much you can do with someone who makes a song like Carry Me In Your Dreams look like a gawky incident at a blue light disco. I would love for Albania to prove me wrong, since the song is one of my favourite pop concoctions in this year's selection, and unconditionally likeable, but I have my doubts.