This post linking to a nifty Sara Bareilles performance holds the blog's record for having been republished the most times. After going up several times last year, keyed to more than one date as I kept trying, weird problems with Blogger and Google's image-hosting service Picasa kept afflicting it. Maybe the time is right to sneak the post back up.
Where it leads is a Vevo clip of Bareilles and band doing a non-chicken, largely unexpurgated albeit truncated cover of the Cee-Lo Green sensation "F--- You", live at The Warfield in San Francisco. It serves here as a prologue to the single "Gonna Get Over You" from her excellent 2010 disc Kaleidoscope Heart, which the first time this post saw the light was relevant since Bareilles had performed said single with Urban Method on the Sing-Off finale in November. At this writing you can listen to the album in full on Bareilles's website.
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Still of Pentatonix from The Sing-Off 3.11 © 2011 NBCUniversal. Photo: Lewis Jacobs.
Well, America got it right in voting Pentatonix winners of this year’s edition of
NBC’s The Sing-Off. I was a bit bummed that just about everybody turned in sub-standard performances on Monday night’s live finale, when presumably viewership would get a bump from Dancing with the Stars’ absence; maybe it was the lack of pressure, since voting was already closed, but more likely the crazy rehearsal schedule and holiday weekend are to blame. Friends who finally tuned in after hearing me rhapsodize about Pentatonix, Afro-Blue, and Urban Method have my apologies.
I complained in a post last month about the judges’ surprising (to me) preference for certain groups over others — on the whole, traditional large university-based ensembles beating out more inventive, idiosyncratic but clearly cooler combos. Not that a cappella is all about being “cool”, nor that I have an inherent dislike of the collegiate model; quite the opposite, in fact.
Still from The Sing-Off 3.02 group open © 2011 NBCUniversal. Photo: Lewis Jacobs.
I’ve had to restrain myself from blogging on NBC’s The Sing-Off each week. As I proved last year, I’m capable of going on at ridiculous length about the show, given my love for a cappella music and creative arrangements of pop songs in general. Until now I’d been successful, but my resolve finally broke last night after the latest in a string of confounding eliminations.
The Sing-Off upped its roster this year to an impressive sixteen groups, starting with two brackets of eight groups each. My early favorites in the first bracket were Afro-Blue, Delilah, and Urban Method, although Delilah soon proved uneven; second-bracket standouts were The Collective, Pentatonix, Sonos, and North Shore. It’s curious to me that of these groups all but North Shore, a traditional male doo-wop quintet, and Delilah, an all-women’s outfit based on the collegiate a cappella model, are smaller
and more experimental.
