Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 06/23/2011 at 10:01 AM Recaps

The Popdust Files: the voice

So how suspenseful was The Voice last night, folks?

You don’t need a recap to tell you Dia, Vicci, Javier and Beverly (OK, maybe you might for Beverly) advanced to the final four. You could have figured it out by who America picked last week, or who did well on iTunes, or who got the choicest recap clips. Even a blundering-through semi-watcher, who maybe caught a few seconds of Obama’s speech and figured nothing came afterward, could have figured out who advanced. A Google bot could probably tell you who advanced after a second’s skim of a few recaps from weeks ago.

Each coach got 100 points to parcel between their two teammates, and you probably already know where this is going: three out of four coaches went 50-50 (sorry Cee Lo, but 51-49 is effectively 50-50) in an attempt to a) punt the decision to America, without b) looking like the bad guy for the sin of judging their singing. So in other words, a cop-out. I’d say I was proud of Adam for going 65-35, but come on–Javier vs. Casey would have been at least 75-25 even if Casey got to sing a pouty Taylor Swift song and Javier got Kreayshawn. Then the public’s votes were transmuted into the same 100 points, and the obvious results were obvious.

This isn’t very engaging writing material. Luckily, there was one hour and fifteen Internets (in the not-actually-spoken-but-should-be words of Alison Haislip) to fill! So in more-or-less chronological order, here’s everything that went down that was more interesting than the results.

- For once we get a standard elimination round, so of course we get an Idol-style group performance, choreographed entirely with bobbing and/or shuddering! Actually, this one was kind of good–Xenia in particular sounded so much better when Blake’s not dropping her in the middle of a disaster-movie Script.

- The collective expression of -_- on the contestants’ faces when caught on camera in the Social Media Room.

- Cee Lo’s poetry slam, which was kinda sweet but kinda like those incoherent chain letters that used to end up in my inbox. Although you could probably get a lot of out-of-context mileage from “The revolution is being televised: red until I’m dead.”

- Less mileage could be had from Cee Lo’s oddly inert rendition of the usually fantastic “Bright Lights, Big City.” Both voice and arrangement sounded stuck in the same sludgy roadside where his toupee come from–if Cee Lo lives vicariously through dressup, he’s about to get a lot of vicarious PETA hate mail.

- Speaking of which, the Gym Class Heroes were coincidentally in town to rehearse a song that coincidentally also featured Adam Levine, so The Voice sent a coincidental camera crew for a coincidental jam session, while the contestants, whom Adam coincidentally brought along, went coincidentally on camera to express their coincidental desire for “Stereo Hearts” to sell shit-tons on iTunes.

- All the contestants either mysteriously sprouted backstories, like Transformer limbs, or if they had backstories already, the coaches wrenched them right out from beneath the contestants’ overgrown voices. Mid-show, my mother texted me: “I don’t want [Vicci] to be a warrior, I want her to sing!”

- Tori and Taylor Thompson, they of the cuteness and the color-coordinated hair and the Boogie Woogie WTF, sparked a teensy bit of fan confusion on Twitter when they retweeted this scathing assessment of Cee Lo. A lot of backpedaling explanations later, it’s now clear that they do not–repeat, do not–think Cee Lo Green is an idiot, just that they really hated being stuck with that song. As did we. As should the world.