Review: Ari Olafsson - Our Choice - Iceland

TellyStats Rating:

7 Day YouTube Views: 70,982
7 Day YouTube Likes: 1,042

Occasionally a song comes along that's so horrifically bad that it's just fantastic. Iceland have achieved and surpassed this measure with Our Choice, a song so terrible it almost feels like a parody designed to mock Eurovision.

Iceland have come along and released their own version of "Love Love Peace Peace" except somehow more generic. The quality of young Ari Olafsson's voice is actually quite good - but that's where the positives end. Ignoring the music for a start, Ari maintains a big grin throughout the song, despite the subject of Our Choice being about death and suffering - I know it's meant to be an encouraging, hopeful smile for the potential goodness in the hearts of humanity, but really it just comes across as weird. Smiling while singing the words "It might as well be you who's suffering tonight" is just a really weird mix - Ari, we are suffering, pal. Further being lectured about world peace by someone who looks about 14 years old also feels a little contrived.

The song itself sounds like really bad christian pop - but even Cliff Richard would tell this kid to tone down the sanctimony and 'Songs of Praise' would ask him to sex it up a bit. The religious sound, the clean-cut look, the big grin looking directly into the camera - that look is familiar to anyone who's taken a stroll down Hollywood Boulevard, the crazed eyes/big smile look is also the default facial expression of the creepy Scientologists who try to lure you into their lair - at least, that's what it reminded me of.

Lyrically the song's an embarrassment, it could easily have been written by a child for their "Write a poem about peace" homework. "Why can't we treat each other well", "Inside we're all the same", "Too many are dying in vain", the lines are so stock that as mentioned above, it really does feel like parody. If he'd added a lyric about "systems that keep us apart" he'd have probably completed the set of things people say when they're coming down from a magic mushroom trip.

In case the song wasn't bad enough not to progress past the semi-final, it's assigned running order (2nd in the ultra-competitive first semi-final) means that Ari might as well just not bother turning up. The song's YouTube Likes are the lowest of all competing countries, incredibly though he does actually beat out one country on Views. Ari is currently 37th out of 43 in the betting markets and it is considered by the markets the country least likely to qualify from it's semi by a signficant margin. I feel for Ari a little, he is a good singer but the song is so toxically bad that it has to receive the lowest possible rating.