Idol Recap 4/21/09

At this point it's really only a race between six contestants to see who is going to be the person to compete against Adam in the finals. If you listen to the judges, Danny is preordained. I'm not so sure.

Tonight the judges all talked. Either Idol actually listened to the public, or Simon threatened to leave the show immediately if his ego wasn't sufficiently fed.

No celebrity guest mentor tonight. So the Idol producers decided that they'd want to waste more of the public's time listening to Randy and Paula after each performance than listening to a guest mentor give vanilla faux-critique of a contestant and then seeing that contestant totally disregard the mentor's advice. Come on, there's gotta be some celebrity out there peddling something. Hell, last week Tarantino got to be a guest mentor. I'll bet the Shamwow guy is available.

So we start of with Lil Rounds. I have no recollection of what she sang except for that it sounded like somebody at a wedding and she was wearing a horrible black body suit that looked like a Halloween costume and showed off the biggest ass left in the competition since Lakisha Jones.

We move on to Kris Allen, who gave a game-changing performance and arrangement along the lines of Adam Lambert. And David Cook. He took a song that we all know, totally stripped it down but retained the heart and soul of the song but in a different format. Kris looked like he positively wanted to kill the judges who totally took away from his performance by turning his critique into a discussion about cross-dressing. But Kris is my darkhorse candidate to unseat Danny and be the surviving member of the 6 to face off against Adam in the finals.

Up next is the aforesaid Danny Gokey, who is the is the most overrated contestant left in the competition, surviving only by the cougar vote and the fact that the judges feel the need to constantly remind us that we're going to see him in the finals. He's getting slightly annoying, each week is beginning to sound exactly the same, is giving off the vibe that he's totally full of himself which isn't really good in a nationwide popularity contest, and oh yeah, sounds like a poor man's Michael McDonald in every single performance.

Next up, in way too much leather is Allison Iraheta. I've loved Allison for a long time but was very underwhelmed by this performance. If you're going to slow down a song, really slow it down like Adam or Kris did. Don't make it lukewarm and forgettable. Allison's got a powerhouse voice and she hit all the big notes. But at the end, none of us really remember it. If she's the girls' only hope left, the girls have no hope to win.

Then we get to Adam Lambert, who will make every person reach for the volume button on their remote control every week. This week it's to turn him up. Every week I remind everyone I'm not a huge Adam fan and I'm not. I really don't want him to win. But I gotta give him credit for this performance, a beautiful arrangement of a classic that featured spot-on vocals and tremendous amounts of passion. Nothing more to say, aside from noting, for the record, that when Paula is all alone in her hotel room tonight, with nothing but her and her battery operated friends, based upon her look during Adam's performance, we know what she's going to be thinking about.

Matt Giraud is up next. If your money was on Matt to be the guy who did the BeeGees tonight in a cheesy, campy performance, you're a big winner. Decent dance moves in a singing competition doesn't quite add up. And it doesn't come any more cliched than Stayin' Alive on disco night. Except for maybe Lil's performance. Which should say something about what Matt's hopes are. About the only thing that will keep Matt in the competition is if people decide to vote Anoop out. Otherwise, he's in some serious danger again, and there's no judge's toy that will keep him around.

The night concludes with Anoop Desai. So in the spirit of the season, Anoop is growing his Stanley Cup beard. Nicely done, friend. Either that, or he's trying to look less like the Bollywood actor who was the cop in Slumdog Millionaire and the father in The Namesake. At the end of the day, Anoop seems like one of the nicest guys to ever have been in this competition, is definitely one of the smartest, but what tonight's performance boils down to is a one trick pony trying to mask the fact that he craves safety in the ballad by going ever-so-slightly up tempo for only part.

Predicted Bottom Three:
Lil Rounds
Matt Giraud
Anoop Desai