It's kind of like death by a thousand papercuts, isn't it?
Like, i genuinely feel like the creative team made a bunch of smaller mistakes, and it was enough to snowball into an NQ. Although Poland
on paper should have been an easy qualifier.
- Luna's vocals were not good, obviously.
- The key of the song was lowered (I could tell - I've listened to The Tower a disturbingly high amount of times :X) to fascilitate Luna better, but she still couldn't do it (and it made the soundtrack sound worse)
- Then there's the addition of live off-stage backings, who were mixed in poorly and were therefore overpowering Luna.
- This comes on top of that staging doing all of those things :beckons arm: which made singing even harder. We all remember how Roxen disemboweled Cherry Red and the other songs as soon as she had to do anything beyond "standing still". This is another example of that.
- Finally, all the chess symbolism Poland tried to shove into the visuals which looked good, but the song frankly didn't need.
Poland misunderstood the assignment; They chose a fun, plucky electropop song by an artist with little on-stage experience and failed to fascilitate her artist. That's not on Luna but on TVP. Luna needed an act where she doesn't have to move much and therefore can concentrate on her voice - My head-staging for this was just the giant dress and ribbons from the music vid -
that would have done quite well, especially since you can stack dress-upon-dress to metaphorically transform Luna into the titular tower without tiring her out.
It's not like Poland lacked a vision or a budget - The Tower, for all its sonic flaws still looked good. My mother who did NOT like the song at all, said so multiple times throughout the night. The problems were of a logistical nature, and they failed to compromise accordingly.
Let this be a lesson for future broadcasters; TRUST YOUR SONG. And stage according to its rhythm and its intepreter's needs. Ensure that they can perform it to the best of their capacity. Ireland did that, and have become a fan favourite as a result. There was no reason Poland couldn't have accomplished that either - but they didn't, and that's why they failed.