NBC’s ‘The Voice’ review: Ali Caldwell, Christian Cuevas, We McDonald perform in top 10 show
Tonight, the top ten show for “The Voice” is here! We’re going to be seeing some big performances over the course of the hour, and our hope here is that they’ll find a way to stand out, and for some contenders to rise to the table to the point that they establish themselves as favorites. Right now, we’d consider Billy Gilman and We McDonald to be the slam dunks, with Sundance Head and Ali Caldwell being on the list of possible contenders for the time being.
As per usual, we’re going to be offering up some further updates on the performance show over the course of the night. Be sure to refresh the night for more updates! We’re also ranking the performances from worst to first.
10. Josh Gallagher, “Real Good Man” – It feels almost cruel to consistently put Josh so low on our personal list of performances on the night, but it’s really not at all due to the quality of his performances. It’s more due to the fact that they don’t do anything that separate themselves from the field. We greatly value originality, and unfortunately, we’re not really feeling that here.
9. Courtney Harrell, “If I Could Turn Back Time” – One thing that we do really appreciate from this performance was that it felt very much like a modern rock song and didn’t feel nearly as dated as we could’ve imagined this song being on paper. Courtney came out with a lot of vocal firepower, and we really do think that she owned this. We just think she needed a little more intonation to go along with it.
8. Sundance Head, “Me and Jesus” – This was a good revival performance, but for the sake of this show, it falls more into the Josh Gallagher camp of not really doing anything original or exciting. We do still think that it’s going to generate some good sales on iTunes, mostly because of the fact that “The Voice” fans do tend to love religious songs.
7. Aaron Gibson, “Rocket Man” – This may not have been the best song for Aaron to give this sort of spin to, but it was a pretty cool, interesting idea! We’re always going to prefer someone trying something risky like this to someone basically doing the same thing we’ve heard many times before so a quick round of applause to Aaron here!
6. Brendan Fletcher, “True Colors” – This was a really nice performance and a lovely vocal from Brendan, but at the same exact time we’d be wrong not to mention here that the saxophone really made this feel a little too much like a classic TV theme song from the 1970’s and took away from everything he was doing.
5. Christian Cuevas, “Million Reasons” – This was a little bit shaky near the end of the performance, but at the same time probably his best performance of the show without question. We felt a genuine emotional connection to the lyrics, while at the same time we really got a genuine sense from him that he was invested in the lyrics.
4. Billy Gilman, “Anyway” – Billy went a little bit back to his country roots for this performance, while still putting his modern spin on it. While we wouldn’t see that he completely changed the game with this, it was another powerful performance from a guy who’s probably not going to be in danger anytime soon. He certainly got the judges off their feet to start things off!
3. We McDonald, “God Bless the Child” – Really great swagger and performance from We over the course of this performance. She showed that she has the capacity to be almost a completely different person the moment that she steps up on stage with the microphone. While Alicia Keys really wanted her to play out that operatic side at the end of the performance, that to us was the only negative. It just took us out of everything else.
2. Austin Allsup, “Missing You” – We mentioned before the show that “Missing You” was a song that we really loved from the 1980’s, and we were surprised to see Austin do it on the show. While it didn’t have the vocal theatrics of many of the other performances, but we were all about everything from the arrangement to the vocals to the emotion he showed. Easily Austin’s best performance on the season.
1. Ali Caldwell, “Without You” – Talk about a comeback! We’ll admit that this isn’t our favorite song like “Missing You,” but she completely killed this vocal. She hit all of the notes, played into the drama of the song, and didn’t overdo the runs and do anything that took away from the melody.
If you want to get some other news when it comes to “The Voice,” be sure to head over to the link here! (Photo: NBC.)