The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as we’re supposed to refer to them in a Eurovision context, have a patchy history in our beloved competition. They’ve never reached the top ten on the scoreboard – indeed, the left-hand side is fairly unknown territory for them – and since Kaliopi’s relative success in 2012, they’ve spent the last two years firmly glued to the semi-final.
After the last few years of internal selections, Macedonia returned to a national final format to select its 2015 entry, albeit one that took place in the last months of 2014. That meant they were well represented in our SongHunt format, but also that singer Danijel Kajmakoski‘s Esenski lisja has been in our possession for so long that it’s almost been forgotten again.
Now reinvented as Autumn Leaves with a new, R&B-styled production, the Macedonian entry fits nicely into the first semi-final’s run of pleasant but not particularly memorable entries. The only thing that might make it stand out from the crowd is if they intend to reproduce the hand-drawn cartoon theme from the preview video on stage (see below), but even that might come across like a cheap knock-off of Ukraine 2011.
My verdict is that, for all I genuinely like Autumn Leaves as a song, it will have trouble making an impact at ESC 2015. I’m not ruling out qualification altogether – the first semi is so random that anything could sneak through – but if it does reach the grand final, that’ll be the limit of its ambition. Which is a shame, since – as the face below shows – it’s a song that can make me smile. I just don’t see it doing that for significant portions of Europe.
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