American Idol Top 5: Matt Giraud

Strengths: Mastery of the piano, performance chops, comfort on stage

Weaknesses: Inconsistent vocally, song choice issues

Objective: Avoid being sent home next

Biggest Threat: Allison Iraheta

Battle Plan: Matt Giraud is already playing on borrowed time after being saved by the judges, but he was safe this past week because there were other contestants who had worn out their welcomes (Lil Rounds and Anoop Desai) and one (Allison Iraheta) who is essentially tied with Matt, trading spots in the bottom three back and forth with him. Matt's situation is much the same as Allison's outside the voting, as well: They are both very gifted performers, but sometimes they just let us down. Matt has hit some howling bum notes that we can't easily forgive because we think he's better than that. He is still making the mistake of choosing songs that he likes, rather than the best songs to suit him, and he can't seem to re-arrange them to suit his best style

Matt wants to be a rocker, but he sounds best singing blues. Adam Lambert, and even Allison Iraheta, already have the "rocker" slots sewn up, so Matt needs to work with his strengths, whether or not it's the stuff he would want to put on a CD, because he won't stay in the competition until he recognizes this fact. Now that both Anoop Desai and Lil Rounds are out, he has no competition at all for the bluesy slot except a little from Allison Iraheta (Danny Gokey could do it, but apparently he hasn't gotten the memo). While the field is wide open, he needs to blues it up, and if the theme this week doesn't seem to suit that, all the better, because the judges tend to praise wildly different arrangements of songs highly, provided they work with the singer's best style. So whether next week's theme is show tunes, opera or Tuvalan throat singing, Matt, you'd better make a blues tune of it, and if you can't do the arrangement yourself, get help!