American Idol- Little Less Conversation, Little More Singing

Aaron Kelly- "I don't necessarily know that this song fits me. It's probably wrong in every possible way, but I'm gonna go out there and have a good time with this performance."

This is the first blog post in almost a week. This is my first day back from my vacation. And this...is American Idol. What a way to get back in the swing of things. Ms. Lambert as the mentor less than a year after his run on Idol? Great to see. And actual great mentoring to many of the Idols this week. Of course there are some train wrecks (cough Aaron Kelly cough) that just can't be mentored.

For the first week since the semifinals began, Crystal Bowersox was not my favorite performance. She is still my favorite contestant, and I think her Saved was the second best of the night, but Lee DeWyze killed it tonight in a big way. It wasn't just that he sand the theme song to one of my favorite bad tv shows of all time (Las Vegas), he actually performed extremely well. Immediately after he finished his stellar take on A Little Less Conversation, I wrote that he really took Adam's advice to heart and stepped his performing game up. 30 seconds later Lee made the same observation, going out of his way to thank last year's champion runner-up.

Siobhan Magnus was enjoyable to me for the second straight week with Suspicious Minds. Her scream in the middle had a certain Lambert-like musicality to it that could have only come from the help of Adam himself. She finished the song off with both a great falsetto and a fantastic glory note that wasn't cringe worthy like something she did early in the competition. The judges, like always, were completely wrong in my opinion. Simon's "you lost who you were two or three weeks ago" comment was absurd because everyone knows her performances of two and three weeks ago were God awful. The past two weeks have been her best in a long while.

Going into watching last night's episode I had heard from multiple sources that Tim Urban was one of, if not the best of the night. I was very disappointed. I wanted to really like his Can't Help Falling In Love. I enjoyed it. But it was just another decent to good attempt at a very easy to sing song. The highlight of Tim's session was Kara taking her love for the phrase singer-songwriter to a whole new level as this week she used it as a straight up adjective. Tim's performance was "singer-songwriter" to Kara.

Mike "Will Kieffer" Lynche performed yet another soft and sincere performance, but his slightly sleepy In the Ghetto was stuck as a middling performance for me. Katie Stevens continues to show that she has the pipes, but her Baby What Do You Want Me To Do kept getting annoying for me. Once someone points out that there is something annoying about a certain person, it's hard to ignore. I wanted to throw up every time she moved her head back and forth as if she had some swagger--Thanks Slezak.

My Bottom Three. Casey James's vibrato is getting worse and worse. He didn't sound like a hungry goat during the semifinals. Last week and during this week's Lawdy Miss Clawdy, he did. Andrew Garcia was really bad once again. He needed to either speed up Hound Dog a lot, or slow it down a lot and bring out his acoustic (broken record). As Lambert said during their session together, it was boring. For the second week in a row, my least favorite of the night was Aaron Kelly. He did Blue Suede Shoes and just like the quote at the top said, it was completely wrong for him. Unlike what the rest of the quote said, it didn't look like he was having a single bit of fun up on that stage. Pack your bags Aaron, because you and Andrew are going home tonight.

My Performance Rankings
1. Lee DeWyze
2. Crystal Bowersox
3. Siobhan Magnus
4. Tim Urban
5. Michael Lynche
6. Katie Stevens
7. Casey James
8. Andrew Garcia
9. Aaron Kelly