American Idol: Fall Out Boy's Rock Band Tips Couldn't Save Us from a Performance of "Hey There Delilah"

Credit: Michael Becker/FOX

One of the criticisms American Idol has received over the years is that it forces its hopefuls to operate in a slightly outdated manner: A singer fronting the Big Band, complete with mini-orchestra and backing vocalists and endless knowledge of pop repertoire dating back to the Sinatra era. This week's theme was supposed to contrast with that—it was called "(I'm With The) Band," and all the contestants were supposed to find something that could be played on a rock station. Given the vagaries of the current musical moment, the definition of "rock" stretched from the Beatles to '90s alt-rock to the currently Nashville-beloved.

At the start of the show, the kids got guidance from Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy, one of this Idol-watcher's favorite current rock bands. The advice they gave on camera was pretty solid, with Stump talking about the importance of crafting a set list so that high notes could be reached naturally and the guys discussing band chemistry and leaving backstage tensions behind once "work" (i.e. a show) started. I wish they'd stuck around and dispensed more tidbits over the course of the show, and not just because of my personal biases. Wednesday's performance show was super flabby, with lengthy introductions and a bit centered around Harry Connick Jr. slo-mo tearing the ear off a giant gummy bear with his teeth. More talk about the technical aspects of singing would have been great, especially since just Caleb asking about protecting his voice from the vagaries of nightly performance was illuminating as far as showing his commitment to eventually heading back out on the road.

1. Malaya Watson. The tuba-wielding teen was this week's clear front-runner with her impassioned yet tempered take on the Beatles' "The Long And Winding Road." Maybe all that brass training has taught her breath control and pacing? I do hope that she sticks around to be a real force in the competition—I could see her being this season's Allison Iraheta, the spunky youngster with an unexpected set of lungs who's the only woman left standing by the end.

2. Jess Meuse. My only complaint about her steely-eyed, appropriately reverent version of "Rhiannon" was that she should have worn about eight more scarves. (They would have given her some stage business to boot!)

3. Alex Preston. That a version of "Don't Speak" that sounded like Jason Mraz's contribution to a #rememberthe90s comp placed so high on this week's list speaks to the high quotient of flat-out odd fits happening this week.

4. CJ Harris. Poor CJ, who tried to call out his devotion to his home state of Alabama by doing a song by the Nashville bluegrass band The SteelDrivers, and who got an "uh, I wish I knew what that song was because I'm not really sure what you were doing" gas face from Jennifer Lopez as a result. I agree with Harry Connick Jr. that he needs to learn what "pitch" is, though, because even the stankiest soul singer needs to have a solid base from which to work.

5. Caleb Johnson. Let's chalk up his decision to sing "Dazed And Confused" as the latest push for him to get on a Coverdale/Page tribute band's radar. The judges went bananas for this—even Connick!—although if you go to your local karaoke bar and perform this Led Zeppelin chestnut even semi-successfully you're going to have the crowd eating out of the palm of your hand. Well-played on a wheelhouse level, but I kept wishing he'd just go whole hog and bust out "Here I Go Again."

6. Jena Irene. Ryan introduced Jena as "our EDM girl," even though she has only really done one "EDM" song ("Clarity," during last week's disastrous attempt to bring the charts' current affection for bombastic-yet-utterly-not-there pop hits to the Idol stage) and sounds like a slightly throatier Hayley Williams—don't even get me started on the awfulness of that Zedd track about last call with Williams on vocals. She sang "Bring Me To Life" (and even incorporated some of the dude-assistant's ad-libs into her vocal). While she undoubtedly has pipes, there's just something about her voice that rubs me the wrong way. It sounds as if it's trying way too hard to fill a space to its ultimate maximum, and it becomes almost squishy as a result. The judges all adored her show-closing performance, though—to the point where Lopez dropped an f-bomb, oooh I'm telling Papi!—and she seems like a lock to at least make Top Five.

7. Majesty Rose. One of the things about Majesty that I liked at the beginning was her dynamism, and her ability to not fall into the "belter" trap that so many other Idol hopefuls have. Unfortunately, someone (Randy Jackson, I'm betting) put it in her head that she had to sannnnnng every time she went out on stage a few weeks back, and since then it's been a series of disappointing performances made even more uncomfortable by the way she's seemed scared of the audience reaction. In this light, Florence + The Machine's "Shake It Out" is an even more ironic choice for her performance this week. It did not go over well, getting breathless and shrieky by the end.

8. Sam Woolf. ZZzzzz… huh? Oh, sorry, fell asleep because who performs Plain White Ts' blander-than-the-BRAT-diet "Hey There, Delilah" as a way to get peoples' attention in 2014? Also I am pretty convinced that the sound mixers are upping the audience volume every time he comes out, because while the Floridian teen seems very sweet, he also has an anti-charisma about him that would have totally tripped my sensors during my Tiger Beat days.

9. Dexter Roberts. Another paint-by-numbers performance of a country song marked by the Alabama native trying to get people to clap along with the heavy beat. You're no Scotty McCreery, dude.

MY VOTES: A bunch to Malaya, none to anyone else. What a meh week.

THE BOTTOM THREE: The truncated nature of the results show (this is the first half-hour edition thanks to Fox wanting to give a nice lead-in to Stabler's Daddy Issues Played For Laughs—whoops, I mean Surviving Jack) led to the whole "who's in the bottom three" mystery being played rather quickly. In the end, CJ, Sam, and Majesty were lowest on the ol' Idol totem poll, which pleased Harry because the results were "about the performance" and not, say, any audience-reaction-sweetening done by the producers in hopes of establishing Sam as a bona fide teen-idol type. (Cough.)

WHO WENT HOME: Majesty, who might be one of Idol's worst recent cases of squandered potential. Here was a young, extremely green woman who could have been a true Idol success story but who wasn't given any feedback that was really useful at all, which resulted in her blindly trying to please the judges by making her voice way too big. Her last-ditch performance of "Happy" was undertaken with the knowledge that she wasn't dancing as much as she was trudging toward the guillotine—her volume wavered, and her breathing became labored. Apparently the decision to not save her was thisclose, but this means the judges have three more weeks to use it. (It expires after Top Six week.) I hope Janelle Monáe, who was there last night to perform a new single and whose "Tightrope" Majesty performed quite ably a few weeks back, found Majesty post-show and consoled her with some kind words and contact info for Miguel.

FILLER ALERT: The half-hour results show led to the usually crap-filled Thursday installment being almost spry, although the commercial for Rio 2 that included both Monáe's performance of her song from the soundtrack (a frothy bit of pop that sounds rescued from The Electric Lady's cutting-room floor) and a commercial-time ad in which the show's birds got their own chance at Idoldom was a bit too much synergy. The pain of stretching out nine two-minute performances was felt during Wednesday night's show, however; after the pep talk from Pete & Patrick there was a medley, and each contestant's performance was buttressed by an even longer biographical segment where you learned things like "Malaya plays the tuba" and "Dexter likes dogs."

SPEAKING OF NEXT WEEK: The Top 8 perform the songs that started it all during "Back To The Start—First Audition" week. This will be quite the boon for whoever pays out songwriting royalties, as Caleb, Jess, and Alex all sang their own compositions!

Maura Johnston is a writer living in Boston. She's on Twitter - @maura