‘American Idol XIII’ top 7 review: Alex Preston, Jena Irene, and Caleb Johnson rock
On tonight’s “American Idol XIII” episode, contestants were faced with a twist: Having to perform songs that the other contestants picked for them! Quite a change-up, no? Well, it’s one that we can actually get behind for the most part.
We’ll pretend that those duets never happened (or that trio with the “country” singers, which was pretty abysmal), and dive in to sharing our take on the solo performances tonight from worst to first.
7. Sam Woolf, “Sail Away” – There wasn’t anything interesting about this David Gray song. Sam is just … Sam. He’s a nice vocalist who is probably going to someday be a great songwriter or person within the business. He just doesn’t pop as a vocalist.
6. Dexter Roberts, “Muckalee Creek Water” – This was a generic, country bar band performance from Dexter. It wasn’t bad, but we’re not going to remember it a couple of days from now. For some reason, we only see Dexter as something different when he slows things down and lets his emotion come out.
5. Jessica Meuse, “Gunpowder and Lead” – This is one of the first times all season we’ve been worried about Jessica legitimately. We were worried about the song choice, and that part of it actually turned out to be okay. The biggest problem with it came in the form of her trying to figure out what to do on the stage. She she moves around, her voice gets a little shaky.
4. CJ Harris, “Gravity” – A surprisingly strong performance from CJ! Most of the tuning issues just weren’t there. Maybe our expectations have just been set so low lately that we have started to respect an okay performance, but this may at least give CJ life for another week.
3. Caleb Johnson, “Family Tree” – Caleb kicked off the show with this, and it was a very nice way to start it. He’s been consistently in-tune all season, but what was nice about this was that he actually had a performance that was modern, and felt like something that could lead to him having a career.
2. Jena Irene, “Creep” – An awesome performance no doubt, and there are probably people out there who love it more than we do. We’re just starting to also feel like for some reason, Jena is trying to shoehorn that piano into almost every performance when she doesn’t have to … or, just stay at it for a whole performance.
1. Alex Preston, “The A Team” – This is a heartfelt performance from Alex, and we liked that he didn’t try to change the song up too much just for the sake of doing so. It was simply, but also effective with everything he wanted to do.
Who was your favorite on tonight’s episode? Share below! Also, click here to get a look at where we ranked everyone going into this episode. Also, sign up to get further TV updates via our CarterMatt Newsletter.
Photo: Fox