Cee Lo Green got to perform, but the last remaining member of his team went home Tuesday on “The Voice.”
The judge who always seems to make the most eccentric choices isn’t always shut out first on the show — he had someone in the finals in season three. But his Caroline Pennell, the 17 year old who was also in the bottom three last week, did a version of ‘Florence + the Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over” on Monday that ultimately proved untrue. Her dog days are just beginning.
Also eliminated Tuesday as the top eight became an even half dozen was the tall, good looking country singer from Blake Shelton’s team, Ray Boudreaux, whose version of the Spencer Davis Group’s “GImme Some Lovin'” on Monday earned him none from voters.
Joining them in the bottom three, for whatever reason, was Matthew Schuler from Christina Aguilera’s team, who did Imagine Dragons’ “It’s Time.” But he was removed from danger by the instant Twitter save, certainly a questionable way to tally votes on national reality shows (for one thing, of course, it only covers the Eastern and Central time zones; for another it may be undone by the digital divide: Aren’t there more R&B fans on Twitter than country fans?).
The elimination announcements again are done in the waning seconds of a show that mostly spends the hour of its results show wasting time. The credits were literally rolling before they announced who was saved and who was going home — with not a second remaining to get anybody’s reaction let alone review the work of Caroline or Ray before they disappear.
Also: No time to analyze what’s happened to everyone’s team. Cee Lo’s is gone; the winning streak of Shelton is threatened as he only has one singer left in big hairy Cole Vosbury. Christina has two fairly strong candidates — Schuler and especially Jacquie Lee, the youngest remaining candidate.
But Adam Levine is clearly dominating, with half of the remaining singers representing his team, starting with the bespectacled Will Champlin, whose version of “At Last” was Top 10 on iTunes and gave him the first save of the night, strong voiced Jamaican Tessanne Chin and another guy in glasses, James Wolpert.
As praised as Wolpert and Champlin are by judges, they showed just how ineffectual and amateurish they were when they were thrown into the guest performance of guest Ellie Goulding on her UK hit, “Burn.” I don’t know why Goulding would agree to have subpar singers threaten to ruin her song, but that may be part of the deal of appearing on U.S. TV (the other is having contestants sing your song, and appearing in the Sprint interview room with Carson Daly). Schuler was also part of the backup, and didn’t do much better.
Of the other group songs to bide the time Tuesday, the top 8 did a version of the hundred-year-old gospel standard “WIll the Circle Be Unbroken?” looking like the Top 80 instead since they were backed by something called the “Starbuck chorus.”
Maybe Daly meant to say “Starbucks chorus,” since there was some tie-in to coffee, downloading the song, or sending someone else a free coffee. The whole show has gone to product placement and endorsements by now.
The other group song was a OneRepublic medley of “Apologize” and “All the Right Moves,” hammered together to endorse the group whose Ryan Tedder will write a song with the show’s top three that the winner of the show will get to sing during the finale Dec. 17. But not if they name the winner as the credits roll.