Idol Chatter & Voice Views

The most disappointing thing about Drew Ryniewicz’s exit from The X Factor last week is that it sucks most of the suspense out of the competition.

At least, it should.

At this point, if the final showdown isn’t between Melanie Amaro and Josh Krajcik … well, let’s just say they’re the only contestants who have demonstrated that they’re finals worthy.

For that reason, the Grand Canyon — symbolizing the huge gap between the front-runners and the pretenders — moves up one spot this week.

Come Wednesday, we’ll also be treated to two songs apiece from each of the remaining finalists.

By my calculations, that means 20 minutes of music in a 90-minute episode, which is about as good as the music-to-filler ratio gets on this show.

Here are the latest rankings, with last week’s ranking in parenthesis.

Check back Wednesday. I’ll be blogging live throughout the show and grading each performance as it happens.

1. Melanie Amaro (1): I’m still not sure she has that extra special star quality — the X Factor Simon was looking for when he announced this competition.  But week after week, she’s proven to be the best singer.  Her rendition of “The Earth Song” wasn’t only the best performance last week, it was the only performance I’d ever care to see again.  My only complaint came when the background singers joined in. I would have preferred listening to just Melanie for the entire song.

2. Josh Krajcik (2): Last week was probably his weakest performance since the finals began.  His version of “Dirty Diana” just did not work.  I far preferred the version by Alexis Grace back in Idol Season 8, and it earned her a trip home in 11th place. But in spite of that performance and in spite of performing first, Josh managed to stay out of the bottom three last week, which shows me he has a pretty solid base of support.

3. Marcus Canty (4): He’s the only one of the pretenders who stands a chance of becoming a contender. But he’d better pull everything together very quickly and do so in dramatic fashion. He’s been in the bottom three two straight weeks. He should have gone home last week. I can’t imagine the judges saving him if he has to sing for his X Factor life for a third straight week.

4. Rachel Crow (6): I will give Rachel credit for this. Between her personality and pluck as the youngest contest and one of the most fearless, she probably has as much of the X Factor as any of the remaining five. The problem is that this is not a shouting competition. Nor is it a competition to see which contestant can take the stage in the most bizarre outfit or sing the most inappropriate song (yeh, I’m still trying to get over “Satisfaction). This is a singing competition, and that’s where Rachel falls way short.

5. Chris Rene (5): L.A. Reid keeps saying Chris is “the truth.” I wish a judge besides Simon would finally speak the truth: Chris is not a very good singer. In fact, I dare say you’d have to go back to at least season four of American Idol, and probably all the way back to season three to find a singer who went so far in one of these competitions on such marginal vocal talent. To top all that, last week’s performance was unbelievably corny.