Top to bottom:
Chris
Bucky
Ace
Taylor
Elliot
Gedeon
Patrick
David
Will
Sway
Kevin
Bobby
Couple of surprises tonight…I didn’t expect to like Bucky or Ace nearly as much as I did.
Ok, time to go back and read the thread (good thing for DVR or I’d probably never get to see the show)…
Rick’s Rankings!
First of all, overall, the guys were way better than the girls. However, none of the guys were quite as good as the very best girls. I agree with Paula; the guys should get 7 of the 12 spots.
TAYLOR HICKS (8/10) - Just an OK song choice. He’s funny, but the man can sing and perform and geniunely does seem to mean every word.
CHRIS DAUGHTRY (7/10) - GREAT song choice, good delivery. I didn’t like the arrangement, but that’s not his fault.
The guys were better, but that may have been song choice. **At this stage, song choice is everything. ** The girls sang too many slow wuss songs. The guys mostly went with upbeat numbers, and more classics.
ELLIOTT YAMIN (7/10) - I disagree that he’s anywhere near the best male vocalist in show history, but he was pretty good. Decent stage presence.
SWAY PENALA (7/10) - I disagree that it was a bad song choice; I thought it was pretty smart, strategically speaking. People overrate falsetto performances; remember how to supremely untalented Corey Clark stayed alive just by doing falsetto? Penala was good, though, unlike Clark. I like Earth, Wind & Fire.
DAVID RADFORD (6/10) - Good song choice. The croony thing I find irritating, to be honest. It was competent, though. I am not sure where to rank him.
ACE YOUNG (6/10) - Great, great song choice. He’s beautiful, and he performs well, and he can pick a song, but he just is not a very strong singer and sooner or later it’ll sink him.
WILL MAKAR (5/10) - Pretty good performance. I kind of find it strange that a pretty good performance ranks in the bottom half, but it was a decent field with few real fuckups. If Makar was a girl he’d have been fifth last night.
GEDEON MCKINNEY (5/10) - Bad song choice. Oh, “Shout” is a great song, but it doesn’t really allow the kind of vocal displays that make it on this show. It looked very cruise-ship-performancey to me.
KEVIN COVAIS (5/10) - My wife was like, “Hey, he was in tune the whole way.” Well, so? He’s a cute little kid and everything, but the show is not called American Cute Little Kid. He is a technically competent singer and has absolutely nothing else going for him.
PATRICK HALL (4/10) - Only caught part of the performance. It was forgettable.
BUCKY COVINGTON (2/10) - That was pretty terrible; one of only two genuinely bad performances tonight. If he can sing I did not see it there.
BOBBY BENNETT (1/10) - Well, I’m sorry, but that was just fucking weird.
Love, love, love Chris. Simon wouldn’t know charisma if it jumped up and bit him on the ass. I don’t usually like the shaved head and soul patch look, but damn! He makes me feel warm in places.
I love Taylor, too. I think they were right on the mark when they said that the thing about him is he obviously loves music.
I actually liked Will, Kevin and Elliot but I didn’t think Elliot was as good as they thought.
Ace will stick around because he’s so darn pretty and the girls will be texting for him.
Bobby, Copa Cabana was probably not the best choice but singing it for your dead grandma might save you, if you’re lucky. He seems very sweet though. When Ryan told Simon to at least be constructive in his criticism, I thought Bobby was going to kiss him. Heck, I wanted to kiss Ryan. It’s probably the least smartest thing he’s ever done or said on the show. Usually Simon doesn’t bother me but tonight he really seemed to have a bug up his ass … no, not just a bug, a whole beehive.
I definitely wasn’t seeing the Sway love. It hurt my ears, then when I heard them praising him I was certain I had some hearing damage from his singing.
Gideon annoys the hell out of me and I don’t know why.
True. But when he was singing, I thought he looked like an Osmond, and should have been singing “One Bad Apple” instead of “I Want You Back.”
Kevin Covais looks like a young, darker-haired matt_mcl.
I think that was him, unless it was some other young, dark-haired kid singing the Jackson 5 song. I’m getting them confused.
Agreed. He seems to have a face that morphs at certain angles. He goes from Fred Savage to Peter Brady to Donny Osmond all in one song.
I’m absolutely LOVING Taylor.
There is one thing that is really bugging me about AI right now: I just wish someone would finally “bring it” all so it will all be gone and everyone else can stop trying to “bring it” and the judges can stop remarking that everyone is “bringing it”. Just. STOP. Already. Gah.
Hmmm…separated at birth?
I have to say that I would have ranked Chris in my top 3 if he hadn’t sang the song exactly like the Bon Jovi recording. He sang perfectly, but he didn’t put his stamp on it.
Do you remember his audition? Or any of the stuff from Hollywood? He put his own special stamp on everything else, I can cut him a break for performing one song like the original.
The problem was not falsetto (although falsetto isn’t really very good for solo songs). The problem (at least for me) was that after the first few times, his transitions between chest voice and falsetto steadily decayed. He can’t switch between them very well, and that’s perfectly fine, it’s not an easy thing to do repeatedly. I do think that he should have realized that this is not his forte, though.
Oh, and the whole thing about “nobody looks like Ace”? The guy who sits next to me in Music Theory looks a whole lot like him.
Why does everyone hate Kevin? He did kind of turn into Elvis, but it was still good.
I haven’t watched the past two seasons, but I’m hooked again this season.
Taylor is my absolute favorite in the field. I think once (if) he goes out, I just might stop watching. I think the reason I’m rooting for him is because he’s probably the only contestant whose album I could see myself buying. Others might be good singers or performers, but would I buy their album? Most likely not.
Can. resist. no. longer.
This post has been pickled by the Pickler.
That’s how you pickle a post.
My God, Ace’s brother is hotter than he is. Anyhow, Ace should stay in the race, along with Chris (powerful voice), Taylor(so damned interesting!), and Elliott (great voice).
Many of the others were quite forgettable tonight, and Bucky was just plain bad, as was Bobby.
Gedeon’s smile gives me the creeps! It looks like some invisible entity is yanking the corners of his mouth up when you least expect it.
Well, let’s see.
Patrick: Awful. Straining for every note. Poor imitation of Clay.
David: Um…no. Poor imitation of John Stevens. Buh-bye.
Bucky: Now that made me sit up and take notice! He did Skynyrd the way it should be done. (Sorry, Bo.)
Sway: Eh…Not my thing.
Will: People, stop choosing songs you like! Choose songs you sound good on! And here’s another lookalike: Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights.
Chris: OH yeah. That’s all I gotta say. OH yeah.
Kevin: Aw, my little bug! Well, not wonderful, but unlike, say, Patrick, he put everything he had into an okay performance, rather than everything he had into a sucky performance. Boss says, “He is gonna get SO devirginized.”
Gedeon: I have to say, it was a brave song choice, and would hav e gone over quite well at the Apollo forty years ago. Simon’s comment is going to cost him votes, though.
Elliott: Best male EVER? Come on. It was good, but not that good.
Bobby: Simon must have retired that “cruise ship” comment, because this is one time it would have been 100% appropriate. Not even that: it was a comedy routine.
Ace: Although he doesn’t do it for me, I can understand his appeal. I won’t be voting for him, but I have no problem with him getting as far as he can. However, I think it was cheating a bit to have “his girls” (blaugh) singing with him in the first verse.
Taylor: Now, him I want to go as far as he can. I second Happy on probably losing interest if/when he exits.
As long as Ace keeps filling out the jeans and singing at least average he’ll surely make it to the final three men, but I can’t see him going the distance.
Poor poor poor poor pitiful David- I wanted to like him, I really did, but he reminded me of a cute version of Bill Murray’s “Star Wars… I’m talkin’ bout S-t-a-r Wars… did you see S-ta-r Wars? That movie’s for me…”. David Cassidy ca. 1999 would have called that cheesy. I was embarassed for him.
Is it just me or does anybody else think of “Let your sssoul glow!” (or even from earlier in the same movie “Free from infection!”). Loving the suit though, and it’ll come in super handy when he takes the lead in the next tour of Miss Saigon.
Taylor Hicks is probably the one person on AI I’ve ever seen that I can honestly say “I would buy his album”. The guy’s just… in a word, cool. And of course really really good.
And “I was wrong” (in a complimentary way) from Simon is roughly the equivalent of oral-sex and a backrub from Paula.
Yeah, but I make my rankings based on tonight’s performances. Up to now he’s been one of the best, but this is the first big solo performance. If he released that song as a single, who would buy it? It’s indistinguishable from the original. Ace doesn’t have as good of a voice, but he at least sounded like he was interpreting the song as opposed to just copying it.
That said, I fully expect Chris to blow me away in subsequent shows. He certainly deserves to be in the top 4 at least.
I’m with you on this one. I really like this kid – not in the naughtily-warm-and-fuzzy way that I like Chris, or the totally-inappropriately-fuzzy way that I like Will, but in a protective-older-sister kind of way. Kevin kind of strikes me as sort of the bastard love-child of John Stevens and Anthony Federov, but with more actual talent and a better sense of proper song selection (for both his age, and his vocal range). His biggest problem is, he’s like three weeks old – I mean, this kid is a baby. He’s got a lot of raw material to work with there, but he’s so naïve it’s almost chafing.
Yeah, He went to Lee High, I believe.
