'American Idol' Final Five: The studio recordings

'American Idol' Final Five: The studio recordings

The results from the show are in. But how did the Idols sound in the studio this week?

Haley Reinhart: Jennifer Lopez may think singing an unknown Lady Gaga song on Idol invites unnecessary trouble, but, in the studio, it was a great move. I haven't heard Gaga's version yet, so I'm not comparing Haley to the original when I hear it. When I hear her sing You and I, I can imagine that a Haley Reinhart album might sound like this, in a way that I can't imagine when I hear any other cover she's done. And if Haley can get another 10 songs this good when it comes time to cut the record, then all my initial misgivings about this girl will vanish into thin air. Her House of the Rising Sun is pretty cool, too, with an organ sound that's straight out of the late '60s.

James Durbin: For about a verse and a half in Closer to the Edge, his Thirty Seconds to Mars cover, I completely forgot that I was listening to an American Idol version of the song. That's maybe the biggest compliment I could give one of these recordings. Without You is more technically perfect than what James sang live, but the emotions don't feel like they're quite on the surface they way they were on the show. Going back and listening to the Harry Nilsson original, I think that's as much a function of a pedestrian arrangement (and the lack of Nilsson's glorious strings) as it is James' vocal performance.

Lauren Alaina: Her Flat on the Floor isn't quite the full-force gale that Carrie Underwood's was (though, like Haley Reinhart's You and I, it'll be new to many people), and her Unchained Melody doesn't fly as free as LeAnn Rimes'. But they come close, they come close.

Scotty McCreery: I'm of two different minds about Gone. On the one hand, I love the song, and the kid doesn't do it nearly as well as Montgomery Gentry or James Otto did. (Plus, at 2:35, it's way too short.) On the other hand, it's a drastically different kind of song than what he usually picks, one that forces him to sing differently and give up some of the more effected vocal tricks he uses on ballads. In that sense, it's a great change of pace for him. As for Always on My Mind, it doesn't strike me as anything special.

Jacob Lusk: Jacob's version of Love Hurts just might be my favorite of the older covers. It's not that I necessarily think it's the best of all the performances; it's just that his arrangement -- with its opening harp and the Stax-style horn part in the second verse -- is so radically different from the versions of the song that I know best (Roy Orbison, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, Nazareth). But his studio version of Jordin Sparks and Chris Brown's No Air is just as unlistenable as his live rendition was: It's pitched so high as to make even Jacob sound like he's in the unyielding clutch of the Atomic Wedgie.

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