'Idol' Recap - Top 12 - Are you in a 'loose mood'?

 

  
The theme this week was "the year you were born" and it resulted in a mixed bag of performances.

Good choice/good vocal:
Stefano Langone squeaked in on a technicality by doing a cover of a cover but boy did it serve him well. His take on Harold Melvin and the Blue-Notes' "If You Don't Know Me By Now" by way of Simply Red offered a great platform for him to bust out some big, long notes.

Scotty McCreery may have picked a country song that a good portion of the audience probably wasn't familiar with-- Travis Tritt's "Can I Trust You With My Heart"-- but it was instantly accessible and likely hit a bullseye with his voting demo. He sounded great too, pushing into a higher register and holding longer notes.

I think Lauren Alaina was overplaying her illness to manage expectations but I'm with Steven: if that's what she sounds like with the flu then she should stick with it since her run through Melissa Etheridge's "I'm the Only One" played to her strengths.

The judges seemed unreasonably harsh on Haley Reinhart. She picked an actual uptempo Whitney Houston song with a high degree of rhythmic difficulty -- "I'm Your Baby, Tonight"-- and navigated it vocally with great finesse and was among the select few that didn't have major pitch problems.


Good vocal/weird song choice or arrangement:
Pia Toscano pretended she was mixing things up by adding a beat to Whitney Houston's "Where Do Broken Hearts Go" but really it was just another big ballad and the remix gave it a weird cruise-ship vibe, which the unflattering white jumpsuit did not help. But she sang the heck out of it.

"Colors of the Wind," really Thia Megia? She looked gorgeous and sounded fine except for one big rough note but what a snooze.

Middling
Weird to say but Taylor Dayne's "Love Will Lead You Back" was too big for Karen Rodriguez. Naima Adedapo's pitch-challenged rendition of  Tina Turner's classic "What's Love Got to Do With It" was disappointing. James Durbin's sometimes wobbly "I'll Be There For You" made a bad song worse, although he had great energy and cute baby pictures.  Paul McDonald was serviceable and no more on Elton John's "I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues" and even he knew it. Having a cold did not work for him. And Jacob Lusk's "Alone" was half great, half hot mess.

Unsure
The strange yellow and green lighting they put on Casey Abrams was awful. I think that he sounded okay but it was his least vocally interesting performance so far. It was a little too reverential to the original. I get it, it was a risk, an important song for a generation. But if you're going to do it, do something interesting, don't just approximate Kurt Cobain because that's a losing battle. And really, JLo, you think "Smells Like Teen Spirit" should sound more "pleasant" and that Kurt Cobain never really screamed? Um, no.

Stray thoughts and predictions for who will get voted off  and in what order after the jump.