The Voice: What We Learned From Top 12 Eliminations

On Tuesday night, The Voice revealed the results of America’s first vote for Season 6, and narrowed down its Top 12 to the Top 10. Here are a few things that we took away from the results show. SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen Tuesday’s live eliminations show yet, read no further, because we’re about to tell you exactly who got knocked out of the competition.

01) This was not a good week to be on Team Shakira. After Kristen Merlin’s microphone failed last night, America thankfully didn’t hold it against her. But both of her teammates, Dani Moz and Tess Boyer, were in the bottom three. Dani was eliminated, while Tess became Season 6’s first recipient of the Twitter-based Instant Save – which may actually be to her detriment, as every artist who has been Instant Saved has then been dropped the following week. We’ll see if Tess can break that unlucky trend when next Tuesday’s results are tabulated.

02) Highs and lows for Team Usher. It was Josh Kaufman who received the first iTunes multiplier vote bonus of Season 6, as his studio version of “Stay With Me” charted this week. On the other hand, his teammate T.J. Wilkins was the other artist sent packing (and before his time, in our opinion). It’s definitely a split decision for Team Usher this week. Leading us to the fact that…

03) The two veteran coaches are still the two to beat. This is not really a surprise to anyone who’s been watching The Voice, but Teams Adam and Blake are (so far) once again outpacing their competition. Back in Season 4, Usher and Shakira were the first to lose artists (Vedo and Garrett Gardner respectively), while it took until the Top 8 to see anyone from Teams Adam or Blake go home. Blake hasn’t lost an artist in the first week of voting since the new Top 12 format was instituted in Season 3 (Michaela Paige), and Adam has never had a singer leave before the Top 10. There’s obviously something to how these two coach that pays off for their artists.

04) Having the artists sing for their Instant Save is an okay idea. Basically the same thing as the “Last Chance” songs from Season 2 (except now the singers are appealing to America rather than their coach), the Instant Save performances are entertaining enough. We had T.J. Wilkins covering Edwin McCain, which made us swoon. And you have to admire Tess Boyer doing Kelly Clarkson and Dani Moz tackling the ever-intimidating Adele. Any chance we get to hear more of the artists is a good thing. Yet we’re not exactly sure what this adds to the show from a production standpoint. How many people actually changed their Twitter votes based on what they heard? Or – as is normally the case with competition shows – did they just stand by the favorite artist they’d already decided to vote for? And can we really blame them for that? If nothing else, introducing this part of the show means there’s less time for shamelessly promotional guest performances.

05) Team performances are still the best part of elimination shows. We know that they’re basically just here to fill the 35 minutes in which Carson Daly isn’t reading the voting results, but watching the teams share the stage with each other and their superstar coaches has always been an incredible amount of fun. On Tuesday, we were treated to Team Adam’s version of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and Team Blake singing Travis Tritt’s “Put Some Drive In Your Country,” which was particularly amusing since Jake Worthington performed another Travis Tritt song less than 24 hours before. Now if only we could download these on iTunes to enjoy for much longer than a few minutes.

The Voice‘s Top 10 will perform for the right to advance to the Top 8 on Monday at 8 PM ET/PT on NBC.

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