Adam Lambert: "Time for Miracles"

Poor Adam Lambert. He just wants to brood around the city and lurch around on rooftops like Batman but people keep bumping into him (ala the “Bittersweet Symphony” video, but this time the assholes are everyone else) between set-pieces because, I don’t know, there’s some kind of apocalypse or something. In the true spirit of narcissism, Roland Emmerich has promoted the film not as a film but a cult, urging believers to book their ticket in the space ark as soon as possible.

I get that nobody cares about most of the American Idol contestants after the show’s over, but I really had high hopes for Lambert. He nailed “Tracks of my Tears” and “Mad World,” and even if the “recording artists” the show claims to nurture only amounts to vocalists who can make pouty faces, I thought he might be the one to make good choices about who to work with. I reasoned that Kara Dioguardi wouldn’t be writing songs for him anymore (in that sense, there’s some hope in that Kris Allen’s record will probably manage to set the bar even lower).

Sadly, this is not the case. Like so many AI-alumni singles, “Time for Miracles” is a shitheap of genres perfectly aligned into a zero-vector of MOR slickness. And by “shitheap of genres” I don’t mean that those involved are engaging in any kind of cross-pollination, but that producer Rob Cavallo reasons that acoustic guitars/pedal steel twang (which hit at the same time as a giant ball of fire in the video, as inappropriate as Lambert’s claim that this song is “earthy”) and huge drums and layers and layers of strings are all like, emotional, right?

This is the hole that the show has gotten itself into: at least imperfect vocalists are forced into making interesting production choices, but all guys like Adam Lambert have to do is show up and sing over whatever pre-recorded mess they have set up. For his part, he starts to give it towards the end of the track, but unlike “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” it’s not near over-the-top enough to succeed. In fact, the song is so close to the audio equivalent of being filmed in front of a green screen, that the video manages the rare achievement of being a perfect synthesis of sound and vision. Now if only 2012 can manage to achieve such Bressonian levels of transcendence.