First of all, I am familiar with only a handful of songs by legendary rock band Queen and thus, was initially apprehensive about this week's AI show. Furthermore, I wasn't at all confident that the remaining AI finalists could ever be on par with the late Freddie Mercury's four octave voice (falsetto included). Nevertheless, though there were some misses, the show didn't really disappoint. Not that much anyway.
My favorite performance for this week is a tie between Katherine McPhee's Who Wants To Live Forever (who else could take a rock ballad and give it a Mariah-carey-esque make-over, and still get away with it??) and Paris Bennet's overtly dramatic take of The Show Must Go On. I thought Paris was the only singer who was able to interpret a Queen song exactly the way Freddie Mercury would have wanted it to be performed: with plenty of gravitas and theatrical flourish.
I thought Chris Daughtry's Innuendo was pretty good but I found his warbling (or was it merely his vibrato??) to be abit unnerving after awhile. Elliot Yamin's Somebody To Love was also worthy of plaudits because of the fantastic control he had over his vocals though I must admit, I thought his voice was almost straining at times to be heard above the blare of the live band -- Despite this, I feel that he didn't deserve to be amongst the bottom three at all. Taylor Hicks was also in fine form with Crazy Little Thing Called Love; his voice was near perfect for the song and had it not been for his mad-as-a-hatter antics, I would have deemed it quite flawless.
Ace Young's We Will Rock You wasn't as inspring as it should have been and predictably, he landed in the bottom three this week. Kellie Pickler's Bohemian Rhapsody started out fine -- she even had the rocker-chick get-up down pat -- but it was obvious by the song's climatic chorus, that she just didn't have the vocal chops necessary for such an ambitious song-choice. Predictably however, she was nowhere near bottom three.
Sadly, Bucky Covington's frank admission of his penchant for Fat Bottomed Girls didn't win him any extra votes this week. But the question isn't why Bucky got voted off -- but why did it take him so long to get voted off??? OH well... I miss Mandisa.
