Tuesday, April 27, 2010

"I WAS SINGING THAT SONG TO MY MOM": Gee thanks, Aaron, because now I can vomit.

I've got very little to say about tonight's Idol, in part because I don't much care for The Songs of Shania Twain, but mostly because there's no sense of surprise with this year's remaining competitors. We lack an Adam Lambert/Blake Lewis/David Cook with the creative skills to surprise us with an interpretation -- this season's competitors are all good in the same way that they've been good for a month (Crystal & Big Mike: phrasing and control; Casey: hunkitude), and those competitors with the largest standard deviations in their week-to-week performances (Siobhan, Aaron) were towards the upper end of their skills this week.

I guess Big Mike and Siobhan were the best this week, and The Outlaw Casey James and Lee towards the lower end, but everyone was above-average so there are no obvious targets. Crystal, Lee and Siobhan are the three who have yet to appear in the bottom three (Aaron's been there twice, and Big Mike obvs has been last once), and I think anyone-but-Crystal may end up going home.

12 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:06 PM

    I hated Siobhan's song. I thought she was singing it way too slow and breathy - I had to fast forward.

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  2. Shania was a great mentor, don't you think?

    I thought this was a good week for Casey.  His voice is not my favorite, but he seemed more connected to the song than he normally does.

    Not my favorite Crystal performance, although it was in the more playful vein that I was hoping she'd try this week, and she warmed up as she got into the song.

    Lee's pitch problems were at the forefront.  I could see me liking him a lot more if his relationship with the notes he was trying to hit was stronger.  Good advice from Shania to strip it down at the outset.

    Not crazy about Mike's performance.  Too much vibrato, and kind of a blah song.

    I just don't enjoy Aaron's voice.  I think this was a good performance for him, as far as that goes, but it still ended up on the bottom for me, because I just don't enjoy his voice.

    Siobhan:  Hi!  You totally lost me with the big notes.

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  3. GoldnI10:29 PM

    What I still don't get is...why Shania?  Love her, don't get me wrong, but she hasn't really done anything music-wise in several years.  It'd be one thing if she had a new album coming out imminently, but she hasn't released an album since 2004 (which was a Greatest Hits album).  She was supposed to have a new album last year but it's been delayed so many times that they've stopped giving estimates.

    I love her songs, I really do.  But if the goal was to do a Country Week with a mentor with lots of crossover appeal, there are so many other singers I can think of who are at the top of their game right now. 

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  4. Whaaa??? Adam, I have to disagree! I thought The Outlaw Casey James was really on the money this week. Granted, I'm a fan of his and have been since the beginning, but I really enjoyed tonight's performance. He made a Shania Twain song listenable--and likeable! The opening of the song, especially, sounded great. If I wasn't having disk space issues with my macbook right now I'd have already downloaded it from itunes.

    Thought Lee was OK - those off notes in the beginning and performing first certainly aren't going to help him in the vote count. I do think it was a good song choice for him and he sounded pretty good in parts of the song. I really like his voice, so I threw him some votes even though I didn't love tonight's performance. 

    Big Mike & Crystal: Meh. And I say that as a Crystal fan. I like Big Mike well enough, I guess, but that's more his personality. I feel mostly apathetic about his performances overall and this one especially.

    Aaron & Siobhan: Please go home. Soon. Before they start making my ears bleed. Especially Siobhan. Enough already.

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  5. Via WTNS:

    For four years, the record for the episode with the highest standard deviation (which represents the relative agreement or disagreement among reviewers) was Queen Night back in Season Five, at 23.4. We said "was" because its record is in the process of being pulverized by tonight's Shania Twain show. In all the years we've tallied ratings, we have never seen anything like tonight's level of discord – it seemed at times as though everyone was watching a completely different set of performances. Many reviewers called it the best evening of singing this season, others said it was the worst in years. Many said that no one was genuinely bad, but a few felt that everyone was. At present, having tallied almost 200 people's opinions – get this – all six contestants have been ranked in the Top 2 by at least 20% of the reviewers, and everyone but James was put in the Bottom 2 by at least 25%. So if the Dial Idol numbers seem possessed tonight, we're not surprised: there's nothing resembling a consensus out there to be found.

    (Two things, at least, do appear certain. First, Bowersox's record of eight consecutive 5-star performances is about to be snapped, though it appears that she'll hang on to her perfect game. Second, no one is going to reach Adam Lambert's virtually untouchable mark of a 35 standard deviation on Ring Of Fire, though Siobhan Magnus is certainly giving it the old college try. Any Man Of Mine might become just the third performance in nine years to post an s.d. in the 30s. Funny, but we all thought it was a pretty decent, fairly tame night. What do we know?)

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  6. I was thinking to myself that it was strange that Adam and I disagreed to quite the extent that we did this week---our opinions usually aren't identical, but this amount of disagreement is pretty unusual---and then I saw the WNTS thing.  All was explained.  I love WNTS.

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  7. I'd largely attribute it to a lack of baseline: many viewers (like me) aren't sure how these songs are "supposed" to sound.

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  8. Genevieve10:50 AM

    I think Adam's right on that - though my husband, who did know how some of them were supposed to sound, generally thought all the contestants did well (he noted that Lee had rearranged it till it sounded like a different song, in a very good way, and we wished he'd gotten some credit for that).

    I'm a little worried about Crystal because I do think that was her worst performance, though not a bad one, just OK.  Hopefully all the goodwill from previous fabulous performances will carry her through - I voted a bunch for her just because I was wroried.  And if Lee goes out, I'm going to be really ticked about the use of the save on Mike.  While Aaron is due to go out, I think it was by far his best performance -- he had a lot more vocal control so he didn't waver on those long notes, and he really seemed to connect with the song, as they like to say.  And until the big screamy note at the end (which she cracked on) that she just couldn't resist, Siobhan had me, even though I'm fairly ready for her to go -- I think it was a good song choice and she performed it well.

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  9. Sheila10:52 AM

    That makes sense to me. I bought Shania's first big album when I was in middle school, but when she veered more toward the songs that have lots of punctuation in the titles - e.g. "(If You're Not In It For Love) I'm Outta Here!" - I lost interest. So last night, I tended to like the songs that I didn't know better than the ones I did. I loved "Any Man of Mine" and "No One Needs to Know" back when I owned that CD, and I didn't like how both women made them slower and less fun than the originals. But I didn't know "Don't" at all and really liked Casey's version of it.

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  10. Mmm.  Plenty of people who watch Idol are not country fans, but they manage to have country week every year without this much wackiness in assessment.  Maybe it's the unfamiliarity in combination with the performers this year---a lot of the performers kind of did their thing (or, in the case of Mike and Casey, one of their "things") this week, regardless of the theme, with only Crystal really doing something that was different.  With Crystal, we're getting standard deviation on the performance, but with the others, we're getting standard deviation in large part on how people feel about the performer.  Siobhan is a love-or-hate performer.  Big Mike's balladeer formulation is love-or-hate.  Etc.

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  11. Yeah, I'm in the "I don't know how these songs are supposed to sound" camp, too.  Overall, I thought it was a meh night.  Definitely Crystal's weakest performance to date, but I still love her.  I actually thought the Outlaw Casey James was very good -- he traded in the goofy smile for a different facial expression, and I like his voice.  I can't stomach Big Mike, Aaron was terrible, Siobhan was DREADFUL I thought.  And who's left?  Oh, Lee, who sang that one song that I actually do know, and had, as Jenn pointed out, an inexact relationship with the notes.

    Oh, and I just have to say.  What was up with the ridiculous hyperbole from the judges about one of those songs being "one of the greatest songs ever written"?  Um, no.  It doesn't even matter which song it was.  None of those songs are the greatest anything. 

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  12. Watts1:56 PM

    Recent announcement of an upcoming reality show? http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20359021,00.html

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