Hello there, American Idol fans! Claire is not feeling well tonight, possibly having been sickened by the sight of Paula Abdul and Kara DioGuardi’s faux-lesbionic makeout session last night. And whenever Claire feels like throwing up, she thinks of me, or maybe it’s the other way around, so here I am to guide you through tonight’s episode.
There won’t be any girl-on-girl action this time around, folks, because tonight’s auditions are in Salt Lake City, UT, home of wayward sincerity robot David Archuleta, and they don’t go for that sort of thing here. After a failed decades-long attempt to make this white-breaded Mormon HQ synonymous with jazz, the city fathers will tonight try for the slightly easier task of making SLC synonymous with radio-friendly middle-of-the-road pop-rock. I was going to ask why anyone would get up at 5 in the morning to stand in line for this show, but I guess there isn’t much to do the night before. (Thanks for being part of this site, Utah readers! We’ll miss you.)
David Osmond, one of what must be eight or nine hundred thousand Osmonds in the greater Salt Lake City area, is the first to audition. Being from one of the most famous American celebrity families ever marks him as a bit of a ringer, and besides, he’s too old at 29 to qualify, but who am I to argue? His sob story is multiple sclerosis – he’s got it (in remission) and his dad was “driven out of the business” simply because he could no longer sing or play guitar. I’m just not comfortable with this dude. He gets compared to David Archuleta, which is correct insofar as he is terminally bland, and his song (“Something Within Me” by Take Six, the first of many, many contemporary praise numbers we’ll hear tonight) gets him a bit of a rank-out by the judges, just as if he weren’t a mortal lock.
The first freakshow entry of the night is one Tara Mathews, billed by Ryan Seacrest as “Salt Lake City’s only goth”. Sadly, as I say elsewhere on the internet, no. Tara is flat and awful, but aren’t we past the point where an overweight goth girl is something shocking?
Tara kicks off a mini-cavalcade of deluded oddballs, including a guy named Rick Kagel, who looks like someone hit Dee Snider on the side of the head with a trekking pole, and Chris Kirkham, who actually isn’t that bad a singer but ruins his chances by bringing along a friend who is some sort of sex-offender furry in a pink bunny costume who proceeds to dry-hump Simon Cowell into a near-coma. Which reminds me: the producers may have thrown out a tone-it-down flag, because there’s very little interaction or excitement out of the judges tonight.
Next up is the rather easy-on-the-eyes Frankie Jordan, who looks and sounds like Amy Winehouse, except with a cute baby instead of a K-hole. Her performance of “You Know I’m No Good” shows she’s got a great voice, but bad timing; I expected to like her more than I did. She’ll have to go big instead of smooth to make it very far.
After that, a big surprise: Megan Corkrey, a divorced single mom with a tattoo of Castle Wolfenstein on her arm, seems like she’ll be a pretty boring choice at first, but in fact, her rendition of “Can’t Stop Lovin’ That Man of Mine” is a wow: jumpy, jazzy, interestingly interpreted, and super-confident. I like her a lot, as does the panel. A little light goes on in Ryan’s eyes as he notes that Simon knows the word ‘love’.
Austin Sisneros is up next, and he makes me immediately regret my dislike of emotionally manipulative pity narratives by reminding me how I hate cocky type-A overachievers even more. Austin is the president of his high school class, which he makes out to be a duty just shy of monitoring America’s nuclear capability in its dire importance, and generally comes across as an insufferable grind who you instantly want to punch in the face. He says he’s going on Idol to “inspire people”. Oh, thank you so much, Austin! Your unmemorable performance of “When I Look to the Sky” by Train, the blandest band on Earth, has taught a weary nation to love again! He’s so bland that he should probably be in Train, and he tops it all off by identifying “It Takes a Village” by Raffi (!) as “an old soul song”. The only thing that in any way mitigates Austin’s total unlikeability is that he won’t go anywhere in the real competition.