There was something of a theme to this week’s Idol performances, and it wasn’t just Elton John. The theme was bouncing back: some contestants recovered nicely from disappointing performances in earlier weeks, while others had to come off their highs. All in all, it was an enjoyable week that exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations.

Scotty McCreery was a mixed bag. It was perhaps the most predictable song choice and arrangement so far this year (although Pia’s critics would dispute that point.) From everything we’ve seen so far, the amount of material that Scotty can do is shockingly limited – country songs with a moderate tempo that suit his unique vocal tone. Now, I’m not asking Scotty to rock out, but there have been plenty of good genre-specific artists on Idol who weren’t this style-locked. Would it kill Scotty to at least try something else? Everything he’s doing right now confirms my guess of how his career will end up: he’ll finish weakly on Idol, unable to keep up with the frontrunners (whoever they turn out to be), but due to sheer marketability he’ll get signed and see at least limited success.

Naima Adedapo was, by far, the worst of the night. This version of I’m Still Standing left me scratching my head. For a while it sounded like this was a performance from Jamaican Idol. Unfortunately, the show is American Idol. This did not help Naima’s struggling cause one bit.

I honestly don’t know what to make of Paul McDonald anymore. He started off reasonably well, but by the end the vocals were flat. Paul almost sounds like he keeps running out of breath; he has very limited range and power. On the flip side, however, he’s a character. He’s comfortably put on the Sanjaya role of bad-singer-who-goes-way-too-far. Take it for what is is – a light-hearted moment of entertainment and not a vocal masterpiece – and he’s reasonably enjoyable. He could surprise people given the right song choice, though.

Congratulations, Pia Toscano. You turned Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me into the most worn page of the Idol songbook, a fact noted by my friends at What Not to Sing. (It’s a dubious honor shared with Against All Odds.) This was Pia’s worst performance, although that still means a pretty good performance. Still, the point remains: you cannot power ballad your way to the Idol victory, not in 2011. She needs to do more and prove that she’s not a uni-dimensional artist. Comparisons to Celine Dion as a pure balladeer are flawed – Celine’s found success with songs that are definitely not ballads – not just once, but twice. This isn’t the radical change some people make it out to be.

I’ll give Stefano Langone credit for self-awareness. He knew he had to do well. Unfortunately, he didn’t. It’s hard to point to any one thing he failed at, because there was nothing to point at. It was completely unremarkable. To make matters worse, Stefano doesn’t have the charisma that Paul has to make up for a middling performance. This was the sort of performance you forgot about right after it ended – which is not what you want with two people going out this week.

Scotty, please take notes from Lauren Alaina this week. This is how a country artist can show they’re not one dimensional. Good song choice helped – Candle in the Wind depends less on pure vocal power and so much more on emotions and story-telling. (This holds true even if Lauren used the 1973 original, and not the later tribute to Princess Diana that’s probably more familiar to modern ears.) There was no mistaking the country influence, but it was a different side of country compared to what Lauren has used previously. Well done; this was the first performance that really showed Lauren could be the front-runner the early pimping made her out to be.

James Durbin violated one well-known principle: KISS, or Keep It Simple, Stupid. There were too many stage tricks here – starting out in the crowd, all the moving about, the piano on fire – this was the singing equivalent of the guy who buys a fancy sports car, adds every known doohickey known to man to make it “look hot”, and turns a good-looking car into a horrid mess. As it was, the vocals were surprisingly middling – there was as much shouting in this performance as singing.

Take everything I said about singing with nothing noteworthy earlier about Stefano and apply it to Thia Megia. Again, as before, the notes were all there but it wasn’t interesting at all. Thia’s problem isn’t actually a unique one for very young singers; they’re often technically good but have a hard time doing emotions well. Thia just has a much worse case than most Idol teens.

Your Song was the first time Casey had gone the slow, sensitive road. He did well enough to make me wonder just why he hadn’t done so before. Vocally, it was rather unchallenging; but the emotions were all there. Well done Casey. Surely he could have done something like this instead of last week’s performance that put him in the bottom three?

Good (and bad) things come in threes, and so it is with Jacob Lusk. He’s in the same boat as Pia and Scotty – we know he can do this over-the-top power ballad very well. That’s fine. Is that all there is to Jacob? If so, he’ll go earlier than people think. Just as Pia cannot win by power ballads, Jacob cannot win if his trademark is overly long glory notes. This was an okay performance, but nothing more than that.

And we come to what has to be THE comeback performance of the season so far. Haley Reinhart has been middling all season long, so where did that version of Bennie And The Jets come from? Wherever it is, I hope there’s more. Haley’s vocals have never really been the problem; it was putting a performance together that was sung well and entertained. On that mark, she passed – with flying colors. Good song choice let her use her growly vocals to their full potential, and she used all her performance skills (and some of her sex appeal) to appeal to the audience. Well done. This was not a performance she just mailed in.

Who goes home: As a result of last week’s save, two people are going home this week. One of them will almost certainly be Naima – the off-putting reggae version of I’m Still Standing did her no favors, and she has precious little to fall back on.

With so many good performances, you have to look to those who didn’t do well either last week or this week: that basically leaves Stefano and Thia. Paul theoretically fits, but with so many contestants left he could still probably skate by on his personality. As for the Boring Twosome, it comes down to whose fanbase I think will turn out more. Do you really want to bet against the Filipino fanbase on this one? Against someone who needed the wildcard to get in? With that in mind, it becomes…

The pick: Naima Adedapo and Stefano Langone to go home.

Well, as far as results shows go, this week as a legitimate surprise. I knew Casey Abrams was struggling – I said after the performances that he’d “lost all momentum” – but I didn’t expect him to crash this early. That said, maybe we should have seen it coming.

There’s one good Idol precedent for a frontrunner losing momentum and crashing just sort of the tour. That was Alexis Grace, all the way back in Season Eight. With a lot of 20-20 hindsight, the similarities for Alexis and Casey are apparent. Both had a penchant for singing older material; excluding the Year You Were Born song his youngest song dated to 1968. An average or median over 30 can be regarded as troublesome, and Casey was above that.

Like Alexis, too, Casey had been an early frontrunner who had stumbled. To be fair, Casey had stumbled a lot more obviously than Alexis had. DialIdol had ranked Casey poorly as well. The comparison should have been made by the Idol pundits – particularly the pundit who’d made the Alexis call years ago. (I was half-right: at the time, I placed Alexis last but thought she would be saved.)

What does this mean for Casey’s chances of winning? Nothing good. In recent Idol history, it’s only been done by Kris Allen. Casey is not quite that good. To be fair, I don’t know if his style was ever “mainstream” enough to win. A more realistic goal for Casey would have been to do enough to get signed. His chances there are still pretty good, but he needs to recover quickly for that to happen.

Aside from Casey’s save, it’s also worth noting that all of the bottom three made their first time appearance there this week. (Yes, technically Stefano didn’t make it past the semis – but we don’t know exactly where he placed there.) What this implies is that this year, voting seems to be very heavily driven by week-to-week performances. Voting blocs capable of saving unworthy contestants don’t appear to have formed yet, or at least not for lower-level contestants likely to find themselves at risk.

ETA: Thanks to @gigglesmo3 for pointing out a brain fart: Kris Allen was in the bottom three. The post has been edited accordingly.

Motown has to be one of Idol‘s favorite themes. Whether or not it produces a good show, though, it has one problem: relevancy. Song age is one of the things I try to pay attention to, and it’s never a good sign when a show has to start out with a history lesson. That’s exactly what we got, though. You can argue that the songs of Motown may well be some of the best, but I am unsure what their relevance is to creating a new pop star in 2010. Let’s go over the top 11 in performance order.

Casey Abrams has lost essentially all of the momentum he had entering into the finals. Heard It Through the Grapevine was amazingly mediocre. The vocals were just not there, and even the performance itself was boring. Yes, I just described the normally lively and interesting Casey as dull. This was a pretty boring way to start the night off – he must have sounded better in rehearsals.

Unfortunately, Thia wasn’t really any better. She’s a competent enough singer that the vocals are generally there. Unfortunately, there’s one missing thing: excitement. This would have been okay in a beauty pageant, but for a talent show? She just doesn’t have the right tools or the maturity. Unfortunately, her fan base is likely to keep her in the competition beyond where she ought to leave, something that’s likely to annoy her non-fans down the road.

There’s an elegant simplicity to Jacob Lusk’s performances. He’s got an amazingly powerful voice, but he is just as likely to oversing and turn singing into shouting. If he shouts and oversings, he’s awful. If he restrains his worst instincts, Jacob can do very well. He kept it in control this week, and did an amazingly good job for the theme. Frankly, if Jacob didn’t do well with Motown, it would have been a shocker.

I’m usually about the singing and not the clothing, but I’m not going to let this pass so easily: Lauren Alaina needs to be able to move around effectively for her style to work. So why did they give her a dress that made that rather difficult? Fashion mistakes aside, this was just an okay performance. It was the very definition of “just there” – no highlights, but no lowlights either. With Lauren it’s less about the singing (which, to be fair, tends to always be at least decent, and mostly good), but more about the confidence. Can she take command of the audience and win them over? There’s potential here.

Stefano Langone was essentially the male counterpart of Thia this week. He’s good enough technically, but this week there was just no feeling or emotion to it. It didn’t help that Stefano chose such an emotionally loaded song; if you’re anything but emotionally committed you will get exposed. This week will be an interesting test of his fanbase.

There’s only one person who can figure out who Haley Reinhart is musically: Haley. She keeps changing who she is musically – one week she’s a decent R&B diva, one week she’s a decent country girl, last week she’s an emotionally disconnected diva, and this week she’s a sexed-up, but (trying to be) classy singer. Which is it? Just on its own merits, this was actually a pretty good performance that deserves a little more credit than it’s likely to receive. If anything, she may be the most vocally unique performer among the girls. She seems to be taking baby steps to find it – but “baby steps” is not what you want to be doing in the top 11 show of American Idol.

Here’s one comparison you probably haven’t heard before: Scotty McCreery is following in Adam Lambert’s footsteps. They share nothing alike when it comes to their singing or genre, of course. What they do share is the ability to basically ignore the theme and do their own thing anyway. I’m not sold it was his best – vocally, his earlier performances were better than this one. Still, his fanbase is probably one of the strongest in this field, if not the strongest.

You can make a decent case of Pia Toscano being in the top ten best voices to ever be on the Idol stage. She’s that good. However, the judges have spotted what I already noticed last week: Pia needs to sing a non-ballad, else she’s going to get pigeon-holed. It’ll be interesting to see what exactly she does next week – theme allowing. Still, there’s no doubting her position right now as this field’s frontrunner.

Normally, taking on one of Adam Lambert’s trademark songs is a recipe for disaster. Perversely, though, the risk wasn’t there for Paul McDonald. Vocally, Paul is pretty awful – with the most limited range out of anyone else in this field – so there would be no competition to Adam’s performance. This was the Idol equivalent of junk food – yeah, it was awful vocally. But, I will give Paul credit – he’s got a lively personality, and that combined with his guitar made his turn enjoyable.

I look at Naima Adedapo’s performance in two ways. As a vocal performance, I wasn’t too impressed. It was as good as it needed to be, not one bit – which, is to say, not all that high a bar to reach. As a performance, however, this was excellent. Naima has a lot of charisma, and that was more than enough to carry her to, like Paul, an enjoyable performance.

James Durbin has hit something of a plateau. He’s good, but lately his vocals have suffered as he tries to be this high-energy performer. Vocally, this was one of James’s worse performances – I tend to hold him to a pretty high standard as he’s done better before. Like the three previous performances, this was less a vocal masterpiece and more an exercise in guilty entertainment.

Overall, it was a satisfying episode. A few bad performances, but even then we were spared a true trainwreck. You could do a heck of a lot worse – like, say, last week. There’s one missing thing, though: we had plenty of good performances, but we’re still lacking that one out-of-this-world performance so far.

Who’s Going Home: At this stage of the finals, there’s clearly one contestant who’s behind the rest of the pack: Haley Reinhart. She’s been unable to build a proper fanbase, and she’s really been no better than just “decent”. She might have done better in the previous semifinal format where she’d have had more time to figure out what she has to do. Two previous bottom three placings don’t help her cause, either.

The pick: Haley Reinhart to go home.

It was bound to happen. So far the reception to this season has been generally positive. This week, however, we ran into the first genuinely bad episode of the season. I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but I worry that this episode showed off – unwittingly or not – what could be this season’s biggest problem.

I wasn’t able to really go over all the changes for this season, but the biggest change was not the change at the judges’s table, the loss of Rickey Minor to Jay Leno, or any of the on-camera ones. It was the return of Nigel Lythgoe to a preeminent role in the production of Idol. Now, as my friends at What Not to Sing noted in their top 13 editorial, Nigel is a fan of the traditional Idol songbook. More than that, though, he seems to be a fan of that particular Idol epoch. The contestants seem to have been taken from that earlier mold. So far, none of these particular group seems to have the kind of grasp on what kind of artist they really are, and how to show that off in many ways. The kind of creativity that we’ve gotten used to for the past few years is missing. The contestants are either one-dimensional (Pia, good as she is, fits here), no-dimensional (sorry, Haley and Thia) or not good enough (Naima and Karen, that’s you).

Now, I hope I’m wrong about the contestants. And we’re still very early into the season. And this is still an improvement over last year’s fiasco. But right now, what we need is that one standout performance that tells all of America: “this is what kind of contestant I am, this is just how good I am, and if you didn’t believe in me, you will now.” We haven’t had that yet. We need to be blown away and amazed. And after this week… I’m not sure any of these contestants have that.

All in all, it wasn’t a great episode. There were quite a few clunkers, and there weren’t really any truly great performances – just okay to good ones. In “commemoration” of this episode, let’s do it worst to best.

There was a lot of competition for the worst slot, but frankly there were so many first-class disasters ranking them doesn’t matter. So step right up Naima Adedapo, Karen Rodriguez, and Paul McDonald. You’ve all won a third of the Golden Turd, awarded to uniquely painful performances. You were all awful in your own way, but there’s no doubting it: you were awful.

Next up were the ones who did nothing but bore us: Haley Reinhart and Thia Megia. As singers, they’re actually both pretty good. The trouble is neither of them have figured out how to sing with any degree of passion or emotion. They just can’t build any connection with the audience and leaves them hanging for more.

Two people, to their credit, actually tried to do something creative – but each managed to do it horribly wrong. Jacob Lusk chose to sing Alone – a song usually chosen by divas trying to prove they’ve got power and control. Well, in that context, maybe his choice makes some sense. Unfortunately, this turned into a rather ugly shoutfest. Jacob is essentially the male version of Siobhan Magnus – he doesn’t know how to do subtle, at all. And every week, he’s becoming more and more over the top. Yikes.

As for Casey Abrams… what was he on? He’s not a good enough rocker to take on Nirvana – and I’m not sure any rocker on the Idol stage could pull it off. Like Jacob, Casey turned in a horrid shoutfest – except that he’s doesn’t even have Jacob’s power to make something like that sound good. Plus points for the bravery, but big minus points for execution.

Scotty McCreery was in the “medicore” category. It’s not that it was poorly sung at all, but it didn’t feel special. It was solid, yes, but I’ve come to expect more from front-runners like Scotty. The country fans will like it, as usual, but not even all of those will vote for him. It was just there, with nothing truly noteworthy about it.

Finally, there were really only four performances that worked to any degree: James Durbin, Pia Toscano, Lauren Alaina,  and Stefano Langome. First, James. As usual, he was able to command the audience well. However, the vocals weren’t up to his usual standard. Okay, but not nearly his best.

Pia Toscano will always sing what she sings well. However, the disco version just plain sounded strange. A disco version of a ballad, no matter how well done, will sound odd. I’m still not convinced she can do anything except a ballad – the way Pia approached it, she was essentially doing a ballad, only faster. She was still trying for the power notes, showing off her range, etcetera. She really needs to do something subtler to prove that she’s anything beyond Ms. Power Notes.

Lauren Alaina needs attitude and the audience to be “in it” for her performances to work. Fortunately, that was the case this week. Good song choice, good execution from Lauren. Well done. Lauren needs to build on this performance and prove that all the pimpage she got early on was worth it.

Best of the night was Stefano Langome. It wasn’t the best vocal – I’d give that to Pia, still – but it was the best overall. Good song choice (if somewhat cheesy), good enough vocals, and a very heartfelt performance. Before I call Stefano a contender, though, I need to see some consistency – i.e., two to three weeks of sustained performances, like James or Pia.

The pick: With so many bad performances it’s hard to call just who should go home. None of the laggards last week did themselves any favors this time, but their mere presence should help them this week. Call it a dead-cat bounce.

Because of that, I’d look for contestants who did poorly last week, poorly this week, and weren’t in the bottom three last week. So someone like Naima or Paul could be in trouble. However, Paul seems to have attracted some fans – and this early in the season any developed fanbase will help. I’m not sold on Naima.

The pick: Naima Adedapo to go home.