My review of "Running On Air":
-Austria is one of those unpredictable ESC nations I tend to not have particular expectations about because their entries can be either incredibly mediocre or surprising in a good way. "Loin d'Ici" was a good surprise to me and, given their decent final placing, I feel like they tried to follow the same "feel-good/happy/light-hearted" recipe by sending "Running On Air". BUT the thing is Zoë's song and Nathan's song are two extremes of the same spectrum imo: the first was lively, catchy, naive yet fresh; while the second was just pure dullness. It's one of those manufactured American finger-snaps-and-guitar kind of "feel-good" song that I can't stand. The music, the voice, the structure, the stripped-down arrangements are just so mundane and all-heard-before: I get it might appeal to some people - each to their own - personally I'm under the impression I've heard the same exact song countless times on the radio before. And worse than that, it's quite similar to Malta's 2013 entry "Tomorrow", which I didn't like either. More generally, the wishy-washy guitar-driven happy-clappy or schmaltzy songs a la "Me And My Guitar", "One Thing I Should Have Done", "Da Da Dam", "Tomorrow", "Running On Air" are a no go for me. Sorry, but I don't find anything positive to say about this song: it's literally a copy and paste of some bland American summer song that didn't stir anything in me but revulsion and didn't add anything to this 2017 Eurovision edition imo. Pros: Error 404, page not found. Cons: The song in its entirety.
Given my obvious bias, I'm not sure there is a real highlight in this song. I'd say the pre-chorus starting at "And I’ll keep running as fast as I can" is the part that annoys me the least.
-Vocally, Nathan didn't have any trouble carrying the tune and singing it with conviction. His vocal tone was actually not that grating, but the song was so dull and cheesy that that it made his voice sound dull as well. With a better song, I'm confident I'd have appreciated his vocal skills. Both his semi and final live performances were great and pretty much similar to the studio version, minus the dodgy high notes.
-Visually, I think the Austrian team did a good job at staging the song. It started out with a closeup of Nathan's face with a blue background and series of yellow spotlights behind him, which was a nice way of highlighting the big silvery moon crescent. I didn't mind that prop actually. There was smoke on the floor to give an aerial vibe to the presentation (like Belarus). As the song developed, pink clouds appeared in the background and the sky progressively brightened to a cyan shade. The fact Nathan stood on the moon quite a long time was nice, there was some great camera angles that rendered the dreamy feel they were probably going for (the graphics looked expensive). Nathan then jumped from the prop and the sky turned red and stormy. Past the second chorus, it didn't change much though. During the "bridge", the earth appeared and backing vocalists joined Nathan for the final 30 seconds. Finally, Nathan pretended to walk on air at the end: the idea was cute, but the camera shot wasn't optimal imo, I hadn't noticed this detail until now
Outfit-wise, Nathan wore rather casual clothes: a shirt, a tracksuit and regular pants, all white (again!). Nothing particular, even though the colour obviously made him stand out from the background. The winged shoes were cute though, they would have deserved a shot or two, as they were almost unnoticeable. Overall, I liked the presentation: the colours were tasteful (even though there was too much blue towards the end), the cloudy sky looked good; I just wished there were more twists as there was lots of wide shots throughout the performance and nothing special happening at times.
Results-wise, I expected Austria to fail in the semi and, the fact they didn't kind of upset me because they were the last qualifiers to be announced (how anti-climatic!). As soon as I saw the final draw, I knew they wouldn't do well with televoters sandwiched between Belarus (a much more enticing happy song) and Armenia (original song and elaborate visuals). The final result exceeded my expectations as I didn't see that big fat zero coming
I'm not mad at it though, this song was already lucky enough to be in the final due to the massive jury support. 16th place overall is still way too high for that cliché to me though, I'm glad they didn't beat the placing of "Loin D'ici": it's funny how with those two songs - whose "feel-good" purposes were similar - Austrians successively pleased one party and turned off the other. In my ranking, "Running On Air" is locked in my bottom 10, it definitely didn't get me walking on air. To me, this song shouldn't have qualified to begin with, when other songs clearly had more musical merit in my book. See you next time guys, I low-key hope the big fat zero will dissuade you from sending another piece of nothing like this year. Fingers crossed, maybe you'll manage to get points from both juries and viewers in 2018
Keep the faith!
