"The Voice": Let The Games Begin
posted in: Features • Music News
After several weeks of blind audition shows, battle rounds on The Voice finally began on Monday night…and they didn’t disappoint. For those of you unfamiliar with the structure of this show, each team has twelve members after blind auditions. The coaches then create six one-on-one battles, for which they also choose the song and celebrity mentor to help train the contestants. The contestants sing the song as a duet, with the coach choosing the winner immediately afterwards.
It’s always interesting to see how the judges match up their battle pairings. More often than not, they’ll choose two artists with very similar styles in order to make their final set of six as strong and diverse as possible. Other times, though, it kind of seems like they just picked names out of a hat. On Monday night, we saw a little of both…The night started out with a battle pairing from Adam Levine, who enlisted help from Alanis Morissette and Robin Thicke. Former Mouseketeer Tony Lucca took on singer-songwriter Chris Cauley with a pretty sweet rendition of U2’s “Beautiful Day.” In the end, Lucca was victorious, but we think it’s safe to say that Cauley put up one hell of a fight!
We have to say, we were expecting Blake Shelton’s battle between seventeen-year-old country singer RaeLynn and southern belter Adley Stump to be a no-contest win (in favor of the latter). Though she has the innocent, naive country girl act down pat, RaeLynn is simply not as talented as the naturally-gifted Adley. But while her performance was shaky, overstylized and inconsistent, Blake chose her as the winner. Personally, we think it might be because he loved how much she reminded him of his wife, Miranda Lambert, who was also the mentor for the young contestant (while Adley worked with Kelly Clarkson).
One of the strangest pairings of the night was Christina Aguilera’s battle of opera singer Chris Mann versus R&B/pop singer Monique Benabou. The two were given the daunting task of performing Celine Dion’s “The Power of Love,” which resulted in a stunning duet that we would love to hear recorded in a studio. Ultimately, Chris took home the win, but we fully plan on seeing Monique again in the future!
Though the night was full of surprises and a crazy amount of talent, it was the final battle of the night that really blew us away. With the help of Lionel Richie and Jewel, Anthony Evans, Jr. and Jesse Campbell took the stage with a show-stopping rendition of Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You.” There really aren’t any words to accurately describe how ridiculous this performance is, so check it out for yourself in the player below. Tune in to NBC at 8PM for more battles next Monday!