Very badly.
Out of the twelve songs in their national finals only one of them was really a duff one:
Die Priester & Mojca Erdmann "Meerstern, sei gegrüßt"
And even then, the singers aren't particularly bad, it's just that the gimmick wasn't the greatest and the vocal mix between Die Priester and Ms. Erdmann was kind of off.
But you have to hand it to the producers of the Unser Song, they presented a contest that had a song for pretty much everybody:
A song that could be sung on the next She and Him album:
Betty Dittrich "LaLaLa"
Blues tinged rock:
Saint Lu "Craving"
And an interesting song from a rap/soul collective:
Söhne Mannheims "One Love"
All of them are quite good for very different reasons, and would be worthy of representing Germany in the Eurovision Song Contest, but Germany chose to send a group that has had success throughout the world.
Cascada "Glorious"
It's an intelligent choice. Cascada has had success throughout Western Europe--particularly in the British Isles. They've even had success here in the United States, with their single "Every Time We Touch" landing at 31 on the Year-End Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2007.
So Germany has placed themselves in a very good place to win the whole kit and caboodle. Cascada has name recognition throughout much of the countries that vote in Eurovision and they have plenty of experience playing in venues much like the one they'll be performing in Malmö.
But as a performance as a whole I found it rather lacking compared to the other performers, and had I had a choice I would have gone with another song
LaBrassBanda "Nackert"
And no, it's not this song, although La BrassBanda looked like they were going to sweep the contest at the early part of the voting.
Germany split the voting into thirds, one third each to televoting and to a jury made up of musical professionals. The third part, however, was online voting at radio stations throughout Germany, and the punk Bavarian folk band looked like they were going to sweep the contest. The received top marks from each regional radio station.
It made for an interesting voting portion of the contest, and I recommend watching this clip of the jury votes to see the audience reaction.
I personally agreed with the audience, I didn't get the song. But I've never been one for frat bands, no matter what the genre they perform in.
For once, I also agreed with the jury on the best song of the night, and it was the one by Bitzkids mvt.
Blitzkids mvt. "Heart on the Line"
Although the singer was undermiked, the combination of dance music, fashion, and performance art was something really fantastic. I'm definitely going to check out more of their work. In fact I'm probably going to check out the work of a number of these artists...
Good show Germany.
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