Disco Night Delivers "Titanic" Death Blow to a Drowning Duo that Will Involve Anoop, Matt and/or Lil

Batten the hatches. Two crewmembers are going overboard this week, Disco Week on "American Idol." To me, the obvious choices even before they took the stage were the 3 who have been struggling the last few weeks: Lil Rounds, Anoop Desai and Matt Giraud.

But let's not dwell on foregone conclusions. Let's focus on the truly bright spots that presented this night. Brightest of them all was Adam Lambert interpreting "If I Can't Have You" from the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack in a slow, moody version that had Randy saying, "You are ready right now. You have it Major League going on, Dude." Kara chorused, "You're brilliant." She compared Adam's new Wayne Newton suited look to "Saturday Night Live meets Clark Kent," and said, "It is inspiring." Paula called Adam's performance "Fascinating. Brilliant. Awesome" and added, "I felt your pain." Simon said, "I didn't quite feel the pain," but acknowledged that Adam's risky treatment of what is normally a fast song was "original" and that "the vocals were immaculate."

Another bright light tonight was Kris Allen singing a Donna Summer song ("She Works Hard for the Money"). He played guitar and had three instrumentalists, mostly percussionists on instruments like conga drums, assisting as he sang a very unusual arrangement which brought the remark, "You took a real risk with that arrangement and it paid off big time," from Kara, who added, "I gotta' give you props for that." Paula said that Kris' version had "a classy Santana feel" and Simon found Kris' singing to be "original, well-thought-out, not karaoke," and said, "It was a fantastic performance."

Opening the performances this night was Lil Rounds, who sang Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman." It was not well received. Randy said, "It sounded so wild to me. It was big. It was grand." But, having said that, he did not seem to like it. Kara said, "I'm not sure it was worth the wait. You've been every other woman on that stage except yourself." Paula rode to Lil's rescue a bit, telling the crowd that she had been fighting laryngitis and "I still think it was a remarkable recovery." Lil, when she had a chance to speak, said she had had fun singing the song, to which Simon responded, "I'm glad you had fun because I think this is the last time we're going to see you."

Allison Irahita sang Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" while wearing leather, sparkles, a weird jacket and weird unattractive hair. But enough about the style show Allison presents each and every week. She still brings the goods and Simon called her "brilliant," while Randy felt the arrangement was bad and "over-indulgent." Said Randy, "I didn't like the arrangement, but I love you." Kara agreed.

Matt Giraud sang "Stayin' Alive" and hopped around a lot, while Danny Gokey sang "Do You Remember" while needing a shave and better glasses frames. I agreed with Simon, who found Danny's performance to be vocally okay, but "awkward." Simon also used the adjective "clumsy" and said that Danny had "no star power." Kara, however, chose to praise Danny's perfect pitch and call it 'another solid performance," while Paula said that Danny has "one of the sexiest male voices ever and I think women of all ages will agree." Matt, clad in characteristic hat, just seemed desperate, to me, and that goes double for Anoop Desai, who has always done best with slow ballads. Again, I agreed with Simon's criticism that it was "a horrible version of that song. Generally, that was your worst performance by a mile." Simon dubbed it "mediocre at best" and Anoop's song ("Gonna' Dance the Night Away") probably predicts what will happen to him as a contestant come Wednesday night. Additionally, though not mentioned specifically by the judges, hen Anoop sang the word "up", he was off-key (sharp).

So, to conclude, we might have named tonight's performance "The Usual Suspects."

For me, Lil was not the worst of the bottom three. The worst, however, were definitely Anoop, Matt and Lil, so batten the hatches because there are not enough life preservers on the "Titanic" and 2 of the passengers on this doomed ship are going down.