Evening all! It’s my turn to take the reins and comment on today’s rehearsals for the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest.

It was another interesting day in Baku; indeed, one might suggest that the second half of the first semi-final is the most exciting stretch of songs we have this year.

So what did we learn? Well, I’ll very happily give you my opinion below, although naturally you might disagree! As ever, we’re going by the eurovision.tv videos until our very own blogger Danny reaches Azerbaijan later in the week, so we’ll see if his on-site opinions are radically different to ours.

Israel
This, for me, was always going to depend entirely on the staging. And yet, and yet… well, I’m still not quite sure. It’s very colourful and vibrant and bouncy, and vocally there are no real problems (as you’d expect from a band of Izabo’s standing), but I’m not entirely convinced it works.

Time is a strong song, but my initial suspicion is that the band members aren’t really photogenic enough to bring the whole thing across on camera, regardless of what routine or backdrop they have in store, and today didn’t really do anything to persuade me otherwise. For the sake of having a good song in the final, though, I do hope they pull it off.

San Marino
What can be said about Valentina Monetta’s song that hasn’t already been said? Probably not a great deal, to be honest, or at least nothing that involves polite words that wouldn’t turn the air blue.

The Social Network Song – for that is its title, no matter how much Ralph Siegel tried to bitch at the EBU otherwise in his press conference today (and we mean “his” – poor Valentina barely got a look in) – is, frankly, still the same compositional car crash it always was. And the backing singers doing some silly James Fox air-waving doesn’t help it much. Nor does the fact that one of them has a guitar, another an iPad, and another some pom-poms. LOLWHUT? But it must be said that Valentina is a very capable vocalist and it’s not going to be the complete car crash that many suspected or even hoped for. In terms of memorability, though, it might be better if it was…

Cyprus
We’d been warned to look out for HBH ADAMOY today, and who are we to ignore a good fanboy yelp? To be honest, though, we’d have been looking regardless – Ivi’s song is one of the strongest uptempo pop efforts this year, so everyone was curious to see how it would translate to the stage.

Speaking personally, I think La La Love basically works, but I’m not sure how well it works. I see what they’re trying to do with it – keeping the gothic “Twilight” feel of the preview video with some archaic picture-frame images on the LED screens – and the vocals are absolutely fine really, despite people’s fears to the contrary, but it might all be a bit static to really take effect. There’s a bench, too, which never bodes well for those of us who remember Femminem. I think it was a good solid first rehearsal for the Cypriots though, and we’ll see in due course how it looks on camera.

Denmark
Without wishing to do the song a disservice, the main question with Denmark was really “Will they still have the silly visuals from the national final?”. And the answer is… kind of.

They’ve ditched the sofa and the other weirdness, but Soluna will still sing Should’ve Known Better in the oddly oversized sailor hat, and I’m not at all sure it works. That said, Denmark couldn’t be more of a guaranteed qualifier this year if it tried, and top 10 in the final seems entirely within their grasp too – was there ever a more 50/50-friendly country?

Russia
OK, so I have to admit straight up to being biased about this one – I think it’s bloody awful. A nothingness of a song attached to a nothingness of a gimmick with performers who can’t actually perform.

With that being said, today’s rehearsal of Party For Everybody was probably about as painless as it could be. The grannies are still off the beat throughout the song (but I suppose that’s part of the “charm”), and they have an oven on-stage to provide them with moral support. I mean, honestly, it is what it is. Does it work on a modern stage with a blue backdrop? I tend to think not, and yet I fully expect the televotes on the big Saturday night to instruct me otherwise. I’d still be terribly happy if it failed though.

Hungary
See, all this time we thought Switzerland was the 2012 version of “The Highest Heights” – not unreasonably, given its provenance – and yet we were wrong.

It is, in fact, Compact Disco who deliver this year’s slice of Real Music That Nobody Will Care About. They stand too far apart on stage, they fail to engender any kind of vibe through their performance, the lead singer still lacks charisma at every level, and, well… Sound Of Our Hearts is just there, basically, nothing more. And a friendless country like Hungary needs more than just turning up to achieve anything at ESC.

Austria
Oh dear. Not that I personally thought they were qualifying anyway, but the apparent need to change their light-show performance since the Austrian final has left us with a pretty lifeless, pretty unspectacular bit of prole-misogyny with ladies with bums and not a great deal of charm.

I still think there’s potential in Woki mit deim Popo, but not in this shape and form. Next!

Moldova
Ahh, the dark horse in this semi. And it is one, it really is. Moldova are experts at getting the best out of even the most average song, performance-wise, and this song is far from average – it’s basically “Ovo je Balkan” without the annoying, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t get at least the same result in the final, and maybe a bit more.

That said, I could probably have done with a more toned-down performance of Lautar. I was expecting a wedding band on-stage, to tie in with the lyrics, and instead we get a bunch of girls strutting their stuff. It makes it all seem a bit… well, silly? I suppose they don’t mind that, because it’ll stand out as a fun performance, and they’re right. It does stand out and it’s absolutely sailing through to the final. I just maybe wanted a tiny bit more from them.

Ireland
There’s almost no point in commenting on this rehearsal. Haters will say they can’t sing, it’s basically the same routine as last year, and the much-vaunted water feature doesn’t really work. Fans will cheerfully point out “screw you and also he’s JOHN and he’s EDWARD and they’re JEDWARD”.

So how to actually assess the first rehearsal of Waterline? Well, basically, it was OK. It sounded no better or worse than Lipstick did last year – there’s no point in applying normal musical standards to a Jedward performance, let’s be honest – and the boys do what they do. We are genuinely concerned about the pretty unspectacular nature of the stage show though, but we have no idea – and nor do any of the other bloggers – as to whether they’re simply holding back because they don’t want to spend money on using up all their tricks this early in the fortnight. So basically we’ll know a lot more in four days from now!

On YouTube, Hungary has the best like/dislike ratio of all today’s rehearsals, which suggests that my opinion might be completely off-key!

What else? As expected, the teething problems in the press centre have started to resolve themselves a little, although there’s still some dissatisfaction about the lack of Proper Food available to the delegates. Come on, people, isn’t a diet of Ayran and nuts enough for you? There’s free beer in the evenings, after all!

Tomorrow we move on to the second semi-final, with Serbia kicking off proceedings followed by the intriguing borderline fan-faves of Macedonia and the Netherlands. Another highlight could be Ukraine, since they always seem to bring a big visual performance with them to ESC. Whatever happens, we will, of course, be blogging about the whole thing for you – and tweeting at our usual account (if you haven’t already, be sure to friend us!) – so watch this space!