Eurovision 2012 entrants, Switzerland and Albania

I don't know what you've been doing in your spare time, but in my spare time I've been paying attention to the national selections for this year's Eurovision Song Contest--learning the names of the singers in Austria's national final, listening to the songs in Iceland's first semifinal, and wondering if Jedward will be representing the Emerald Isle again.

But that doesn't really make for a good blog post.

Thankfully, two countries have already chosen their entrants, so let's take a listen:

Switzerland

After a convoluted selection process, where the German, French and Italian broadcasters entered songs into the selection, and eventually this Swiss public selected Sinplus, a duo made up of the brothers Ivan and Gabriel Broggini.

Sinplus  "Unbreakable"

And after listening to this a couple times, I'm still completely underwhelmed.  They come across as a college cover band you'd see at the bar on a Thursday night that were attempting to become legit by playing their own compositions.  In other words, I admire their gumption, but I wish they'd go back to playing "Beautiful Day" or "Clocks".

Albania

Albania's selection process was  a little less convoluted, with the winner, Rona Nishliu, winning the Festivali i Kenges, the process the country has used to select their entrant since 2004.  Rona is Kosovaran, which should make for some interesting political voting, but let's take a listen to the song.

OK.  She has pipes.  The orchestration is pretty.   But the song combined with her look is rather frighening--the high pitched wailing combined with the mess of hair and the Albanian lyrics are off-putting.  Hopefully this will get fixed with a stylist and an English translation of the lyrics.

What do you think of the two entrants?