Michael Johns – Yet another singer who confuses vibrato with goat noises, and shouting with power. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to imitate Lindsey Buckingham or Stevie Nicks. The performance started out quite uneven and started falling apart in the middle, and there was one point where it seemed distracted and a bit lost. Could barely stay on key during the chorus.
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Luke Menard – Nice knowin’ ya. Other than the fact that he looks like Orlando Bloom/Hugh Jackman/Bruce Campbell/Patrick Dempsey, Luke was about as bland, soulless, and uninteresting as Idol has ever presented. His voice, is high, thin, and really, really bland. He performance skills are non-existent.
Robbie Carrico – On the rocking scale from 1 to 100, Rockin’ Robbie rates a
three. I will say that the dude has really hairy hands. Shouty and insubstantial, Robbie should go back to
his roots and fade away like the Backstreet Boys. How long does this joke keep going?
Danny Noriega – Danny actually has a good lower register and can teach Michaels Johns a thing or two about what real vibrato is. I thought he was better than the judges gave him credit for, but he should stop raiding his
grandpa’s closet for wardrobe.
Jason Castro – I rather liked his acoustic take on the Bee Gees
I Just Want to Be Your Everything. I didn’t really understand all the hate the judges were showing other than they were trying to get him to stop playing guitar. Whatever it was, it was a total bummer. It’s enough to make someone
take a bong hit. For me Jason is the male counterpart to Brooke White in that he won’t blow the doors off with his voice, but he has a nice tone and he doesn’t have any pitch problems.
David Hernandez – Like last week, I will not dispute that David has the technical chops – he can effortlessly glide from one note to the next and he has relatively few pitch problems. But the myriad of
cheesy faces and gestures give his performance the phony theatricality of a two-bit Las Vegas magician. I just find his performances soulless.
Jason Yeager – A shouty, plodding rendition of
Long Train Runnin’, Jason also amped up the cruise ship stylings by
smiling ear to ear and
over-emoting cheesily throughout the song. As if that weren’t enough, they killed what seemed like five minutes on the things that he could do to improve for next week, ignoring the foregone conclusion that
there won’t be a next week for Jason. Poor Jason – he even put his
friends to sleep.
Chikieze – Chikieze
reached back and brought it tonight and deserved every scrap of praise the judges gave him. The only thing is, the guy has zero charisma and probably won’t make it to the final 12 no matter how well he sings.
David Cook – The interview segment was about the things America doesn’t know about the Idol contestants. I was expecting David to tell everyone that he’s really bald, but shit man, we know that already. David did one up Gina Glocksen by actually displaying rock and roll chops, and even I had to admit he did a good job. I was not fond of some of the “rock star” mannerisms like
winking to the crowd. Dude, you gotta earn the right to do that shit.
David Archuleta – I will have to agree with most of the sentiments and praise the judges heaped upon young David, and I will add only this: David only missed one note the entire song (which, for some reason, they showed in the voting recap). The un-Idol like thing he did was that he didn’t scoop a single note, which is one of the reasons why it sounded so dead on. Scooping, by the way, is when you start a note out somewhere near the note you wanted to hit, and then you work your way to it, and sort of sounds like the THX sweep. Of course, if you have perfect technical control, you can just hit the note you want, which is exactly what David was doing. I’m not going to say that David’s reason for skipping ahead to the third verse was a lie, but really – do you want to sing the verse with, “Imagine there’s no heaven” or the verse with “And no religion too” in front of 30 million Americans? And expect to come back the next week? Of all the bizarre things that have trickled haltingly out of Paula Abdul’s mouth, tonight proclamation/threat to David, “I want to squish you, squeeze your head off and dangle you from my rearview mirror,” was the weirdest, most psychopathic utterance that ever made its way through Paula’s slurring. Add some fava beans and a bottle of chianti, and it sounds like something Hannibal Lecter would say. Lastly, I didn’t know
David’s father was Danny Bonaduce.
Carly Smithson – Started off really good, but as Heart’s
Magic Man moved into Carly’s upper register, it started getting a bit shrill as she strained for some of the notes, and lost a lot of steam towards the end. After the song was over, she started huffing and puffing like Reuben Studdard.
Syesha Mercado – Started off really good, and I was really digging it because most female Idol singers have really weak lower registers. Then she hit the chorus. First off, switching the gender of Mrs. Jones to Mr. Jones was so jarring I couldn’t get back into it. Also, I thought it would be bigger and more sweeping. For whatever reason, her lower register started getting shaky after the chorus, and the song itself just got slower. That last note was not on key.
Brooke White – Started off really good… hey – what going on here? Again, the middle lost energy, but I like her voice a lot – it’s pretty and bright but has a whisky soaked character to it.
Ramiele Malubay – Started off really good… seriously, what the hell is going on tonight? The chicks so far are the front runners, they only have to sing about two minutes, and they can’t keep it going for more than 60 seconds. Ramiele also has a good lower register, but this is the second week that I thought she was going to blow up the chorus, but it turned out to be sort of a fizzle. Maybe she isn’t the singer I thought she was going to be. Girlfriend gotta get a better outfit – this is the second week she wore camel toe jeans, although the
camel toe itself was hidden under her top. Put on a dress or something, will ya? And I’m not a big fan of the hair – it looks like the world’s biggest
comb over.
Kristy Lee Cook – When she started talking about how much she liked doing guy stuff, I started to wonder if she liked “doing” other things guys like. Yes, I mean sex with girls. Turns out,
no. Kristy is the first contestant this year to bust out the
Star Trek fashions, a
low cut silver lame number that showed off her desperation. I mean, cleavage. No, no, desperation is correct. I suppose it was apropos that she dressed like Seven of Nine, as they share a similar robotic demeanor and android stiffness. She started out the song with some awkward looking
kick-step moves, like she was a horse cantering or something. Then she repeatedly busted out this
karate stance, heretofore never seen on the Idol stage. The vocal performance was okay, but unspectacular. There was a phlegmy gargling sound towards the end that made the word “forget” sound like “forggggle”. Laugh and rewind, laugh and rewind, laugh and rewind.
Amanda Overmyer – I’m going to miss Amanda when she’s gone. There’s this train wreck quality about her that is entertaining, although it was pretty painful to listen to her mangled rendition of
Carry On My Wayward Son. It started with her singing in a slightly different key than the backup singers, and then the high energy caterwauling got rougher and rougher sounding until it was verging on unlistenable. The ending was really weird – I though she was going to attack another verse, and then it stopped abruptly.
The hair was some amalgam of Lily Munster and That Girl. Depending on the lighting and where she was standing, the darker parts of her hair blended into the background and it looked like she was
electrocuted. Idol fashion debut tonight:
Chaps. Hey – she pulled it off. By the way, if you were wondering what “team” Amanda plays for, the
cut to the audience didn’t do anything to clear up the ambiguity like it did with Kristy. The guy sitting next to her mother is just a “friend”. Incidentally, Amanda’s mom is hotter than she is. At first, I thought, “Damn, she looks good for being sixty-something”, but then I remembered that Amanda is 25 and not 45, so her mom looks like an age appropriate forty-something.
Alaina Whitaker – Tonight, we learned that Alaina has OCD, and loses her shit unless the food on her plate doesn’t touch each other. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that her two front teeth don’t touch each other and she’s projecting. Now, some readers may be thinking, “Damn! That’s just wrong, she’s only 17!” Please keep in mind that this blog, much like the show itself, is built on schadenfreude and meanness, and, much like the show itself, it does not discriminate based on age. My wife was bothered by Alaina’s
constant slouching, but I was bothered by shrill sound of voice, because she just uses her head voice instead of belting with her chest voice. Of course, it’s difficult to use your chest voice when you’re slouching. So as it turns out, my wife and I are bothered by the same problem but in different ways.
Alexandrea Lushington – Last week, Amy was kicked off the show after delivering an Antonella Barba-esque performance. This week’s Antonella Barba-esque performance was brought to you by the whimsically named Alexandrea Lushington. Flat throughout, Alexandrea was unable to actually get in the proper key and sort of wandered around waiting for the song to finish. Alexadrea, don’t quit your day job. Which, if her outfit is any indication, appears to be
Bike Messenger. My wife was appalled by the cargo shorts, and I didn’t understand how she possibly thought those shoes would go with that outfit. What up with the fashion sense in the ATL?
Kady Malloy – I thought that maybe it started off key as she was walking down the stairs because she couldn’t hear the floor monitors. Then she hit the floor and, yep – still off key. In fact, it didn’t matter where she went, she just wasn’t able to stay consistently on key. She did hit like four or five nice notes, but tthe last big one wasn’t one of them. My wife was put off by her
greasy hair. BTW, Kady has this nervous habit where she bounces on the balls of her feet really fast and it looks like she vibrating. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, you will probably see it during the results show. You know what I mean?
Asia’h Epperson – Asia’h’s lower register is pretty weak (doesn’t that look weird with two apostrophes?), and her voice cut out just as she hit the chorus of
All By Myself, which sounded like, “All * * * self. Maybe she should go to David Archuleta’s doctor to check for paralyzed vocal chords. I mean, David seems to be doing fine. And the
Andrews Sisters outfit? Didn’t work for me.
