Review: Ester Peony - On A Sunday - Romania

TellyStats Rating:

1 Day YouTube Views: 56,388
1 Day YouTube Likes: 3,624

After last year's dated entry by The Humans, Romania return with On A Sunday by Ester Peony whose win at Selectia Nationala 2019 was subject to much controversy - the juries effectively overruled the televote which had placed Ester in 8th place out of 12.

As for the song itself, I'll lay my cards on the table - I think this song is fab - on a personal level. A great blues beat with the guitar providing a hint of country. It's one of the few songs that engaged me from the first listen - probably because of my bias towards blues tracks. However, listening to this song, I can't help but feel the songwriters missed a number of open goals which drag it down considerably.

One of the issues is the lazy overuse of the 'Ey-Ey-Ey' sound, it's heard repeatedly throughout the song, would it have been so hard to come up with an appropriate lyric instead? In a similar vein, the final 30 seconds suggest some laziness on the part of the songwriters where Ester simply wails. Too much of this song is just noises rather than words and it really does cheapen the entire experience. The final issue I have with "On A Sunday" is that it takes too long to switch up, the "Wake me up..." lyric around 2:20 into the song was where the song should have stepped up a gear, instead it's more of the same.

This brings me to the topic of how appropriate the song is for the Eurovision audience and I can't help feeling that once again, Romania will be shown an early door from the competition. While this song is great for a steamy close dance in a dimly-lit room, it isn't going to translate on the Eurovision stage nearly as well. It has an air of "Crazy" by Franka last year for Croatia who crashed out in their semi in 17th place out of 19.

So setting aside my personal bias, I have to conclude that this will be a no-qualifier. Romania's YouTube stats are once again rather poor, languishing near the bottom of the table on both Views and Likes. A similar situation with Ester's social media statistics which don't display any significant momentum. No qualifier for me, purely on the basis of Eurovision appropriateness.

Will Ester be holding the Eurovision trophy on a Sunday? Let us know what you think in the comments below.