NBC’s ‘The Voice’ video: Preview Matt Cermanski, James Irwin’s battle round performance
Are the Battle Rounds going to be over soon on “The Voice”? The good news here is that they will be, but the bad news is that you still have a little bit more to get through if you’re not a fan of this phase of the competition (and from our vantage point, it is the weakest).
At least the video preview below proves that there is still some good talent coming up on the show. In it, you can see Matt Cermanski and James Irwin do a solid job with a song from OneRepublic in “Counting Stars.” Is this an example of Adam Levine getting a little bit too cute with his team? You gotta think so, since Ryan Tedder of this group is the adviser for him, and this is not even one of the band’s more-popular songs. Well, we guess, though, that this is one of the incentives to come on the show since getting to have one of your songs performed in front of such a large audience is always a good thing.
Both contestants are hitting all of the notes in the video below, but the problem is that we don’t see either one of them right now as the winner of the next phase of the competition. This is probably why we don’t like this stage of the competition in the first place: Regardless of how good you are, it’s hard to look like a star when you are forced to perform alongside someone who, quite frankly, you’re not used to performing with. This makes things tricky, and really takes the whole “making a star” angle out of it. We wish that this phase was handled almost like group rounds on “American Idol,” where you maybe see full performances of six or so really great songs, and skim over the rest, since they’re not going to help anyone in the first place. The knockouts may not be amazing, but at least the artists are getting a chance to sing on their own without someone else to worry about harmonizing with.
In case you missed it, we have the dates for the first live shows on “The Voice” here, which includes a rare Thursday airing for a results show. Set your DVRs accordingly.
Photo: NBC