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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Season Ten. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.