American Idol - 2/18/03

Cafe Society
1

Well, this was definitely the most blah group yet. The full contestant page for this group of 8 can be viewed here.

My top 3 picks for tonight are, coincidentally, the first 3 performers:

Kimberly Kelsey - I hate Celine Dion, but she had a strong voice and good presence.

Jordan Segundo - the best of the men tonight, IMO. What was with the weirdo zipper on the sweater, though?

Vanessa Olivarez - cute, perky, good voice, upbeat personality, handled Simon’s slam on her weight with aplomb. I like her.

If I had to pick, I’d go for Jordan and Vanessa as the final two from this group. I think that George Trice might have a nice voice, but Unchained Meloday was too slow and laid back for him to showcase it…poor song choice. I can’t stand the falsetto of Ricky Smith and the foofy hand clapping has got to go. Louis Gazzara shouldn’t have touched that Michael Bolton song with a 10 foot pole…he was the worst of the bunch tonight. Lessee…who’s left? Samantha Cohen is way too skinny to be singing a big, brash Aretha song. As for Equoia, I don’t recall her audition, but they showed a clip of Simon saying “Why don’t you already have a recording contract?”…needless to say, it just goes to show that one audition doesn’t tell the whole story. I thought her performance was extraordinarily mediocre.

Thoughts?

2

I have to agree with you and the judges. There were some decent vocal performances, but the overall effect was blah. The song selections were terrible for the most part. Unless the goal was to induce sleep.

I think the performance of the night, both vocally and entertainment wise, was Vanessa Oliverez. The others are a pick-'em, but I would probably go with Kimberly, not so much because her voice was that amazing, but rather because she looks the part. She has something to build on, I think. On the whole, the performances suffered from frequent moments of being off-key, and overall I thought they were far below the performances of the last few weeks. At least no one said they thought Simon sucked and then bragged about their ability to put him in his place. (puh-lease).

Oh well, there is always next week.