Some girls attempt Beyonce. Some sing Whitney Houston. And some women channel Kim Burrell.
That last name may not mean much to everybody who watched American Idol's female semifinals show Tuesday, but it does to female singers with gospel and R&B in their backgrounds. And I'd lay cash money it means something to Candice Glover.
Glover, who performed last Tuesday, finished the show with the kind of performance that resets how all the ones before her were perceived. Suddenly, performances that originally had made big impressions -- like Breanna Steer's sultry but cool take on Beyonce's Flaws and All or Amber Holcomb's nearly note-perfect rendition of Whitney Houston's I Believe in You and Me -- suddenly seemed like mere attempts to measure up.
"You sang notes that people don't even understand how they could fit into a chord," said an astonished Randy Jackson.
The show's producers may have put Glover last for a reason. With performances that generally ranged from strong to fantastic -- Zoanette Johnson's trainwreck on What's Love Got to Do With It excepted -- it would have been easy for nearly anyone to get lost in the middle of the show.
When the results come in Thursday, one or two women who would make a solid finalist almost surely will go home too soon. It likely won't be Glover, though. And it certainly won't be Angie Miller.
Miller's looking more and more like this season's odds-on favorite. Tuesday, she sat down behind the piano and took possession of Never Gone, the original song that Season 11 finalist Colton Dixon introduced on the American Idols Live tour last summer. "The trumpets should sound when you walk in the room," Nicki Minaj told her, as she assured her a spot in the finals.
Kree Harrison established herself as this season's country singer to beat, giving a powerful performance of Faith Hill's Stronger that overshadowed Janelle Arthur's restless rendition of Elvis Presley's If I Can Dream.
Amber Holcomb bucked conventional Idol wisdom to perform a Houston song and might have sung herself into the finals by doing so. She faced stiff competition, though, from Steer (though the judges gave her a lukewarm response) and Aubrey Cleland, who sang Fergie's Big Girls Don't Cry.
Johnson and Tenna Torres, who both sang early in the show, will almost surely be eliminated Thursday. So will the season's youngest female contestant, Adriana Latonio, who had the misfortune of singing a pageant-level rendition of Destiny's Child's Stand Up for Love immediately before Glover's tour de force.
Between them on the bottom end and Glover, Miller and Harrison on the top, it's anybody's game.
Here's how I ranked Tuesday night's performances (with some of them agonizingly close):
- Ordinary People, Candice Glover
- Stronger, Kree Harrison
- Never Gone, Angie Miller
- I Believe in You and Me, Amber Holcomb
- Big Girls Don't Cry, Aubrey Cleland
- Flaws and All, Breanna Steer
- If I Can Dream, Janelle Arthur
- Stand Up for Love, Adriana Latonio
- Lost, Tenna Torres
- What's Love Got to Do With It, Zoanette Johnson
I'll be a little surprised, though, if my Top Five wind up being the five female finalists. I hope you'll put your rankings in the comments section.
Collected from :http://www.usatoday.com
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