Eurovision 2019 spotlight: Estonia's Victor Crone with "Storm"...

I'm traveling through my series of spotlights on the countries and singers participating in this year's Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv, Israel. If you want to catch up on the posts so far, you can find all the entries by clicking here. And on we go...

Last year at Eurovision 2018 at Lisbon, Portugal, one of my favorites to win came from the Baltic country of Estonia, with operatic singer Elina Nechayeva (and her glorious projection dress) with the dramatic pop-opera of "La Forza". One of the picks to possibly win, she ended up in 8th place, pretty respectable in general but way lower than I had expected. In this year's Eesti Laul, the national competition to select Estonia's entry, a "ringer" of sorts won, with a Swedish singer with no real big ties to the country took the prize with an EDM song written by a local artist whose been to Eurovision before.

Estonia - "Storm" by Victor Crone

Crone, who was born in the Stockholm suburb of Österåker, moved to America in his adult years to further his music and songwriting career. He first tried out for Sweden's national contest Melodifestivalen in 2015 with the song "Det rår vi inte för" as the featured vocalist for rap Behrang Miri, but failed to even make the finals. Four years later, Victor entered in the Estonian contest, with a song co-written by Stig Rästa, who represented the country in Eurovision in 2015 with Elina Born and the song "Goodbye To Yesterday", which came in 7th. The result is "Storm", a paint-by-number dance music track that has nothing of the rolling storyline of "Goodbye", but rather something that ably copies an Avicii track played on the radio or at any EDM festival. The lyrics feel translated, to the point where the chorus has "this" rhyming with...."this". To its credit, "Storm" more than any of the other entries sounds like popular music (well, maybe more so from 2015), and Victor's performance is much more livelier and nuanced than the other EDM track in that semi-final, "Look Away" from Darude and Sebastian Rejman, and the almost country music-ish beginning is much more welcome...

Now this comes down to whether the two EDM tracks will cancel each other out, or whether Darude's name recognition give's Finland an edge. And I honestly don't understand the woman just appearing out of nowhere then disappearing, and then we have a guitar materializing. And coming just after Iceland's sonic locomotive that is Hatari, I think unless he really steps up his game this will just deflate. It's the "weak" semi, so I wouldn't count this one, but this definitely isn't "Heroes, part 2". (Rating: 5.5/10)

(Click below to see the rest of the post)


The former Soviet Republic of Estonia has been competing in Eurovision since 1994 (the year before they failed to qualify). In the twenty-four times they been in it so far, the country has made the top ten in the finals ten times, and have won the competition once - with probably one of the worst songs ever to take the trophy, "Everybody" by Tanel Padar, Dave Benton, and hip-hop group 2XL, in 2001, giving the country the opportunity to host the event the following year in the capital of Tallinn...

But on the other hand, my personal favorite from the country criminally didn't even make the finals, with Koit Toome and Laura's amazing "Verona", originally a bettor's pick in 2017, plagued by a microphone issue (they should've redone it when offered). This is not only my favorite from Estonia, but one of my favorite Eurovision songs of all time...

But by far the worst came in 2008 (a horrid year as it was) when the country couldn't make it out of the semis with the WTF-ness of "Leto Svet" by the comedic group Kreissradio, sung partly in Serbian and Finnish, and shooting the equivalent of the "f" word onstage at the end...