‘The Voice’ recap: Kat Perkins electrifies, two get zapped

Looks like Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stefani will have their work cut out for them when they join “The Voice” as coaches next season, competing with repeat winners Adam Levine and Blake Shelton. (Yes, it’s official; Carson Daly announced it at the top of Tuesday’s results show.) Just look at what’s become of the two coaches previously summoned to sit in for absent original coaches CeeLo Green, who has left the show, and Christina Aguilera, who is taking a break to have a baby.

Shakira and Usher, trying for the second time to challenge the Levine-Shelton hegemony, started this season full of plans and promise. But just two weeks into the live elimination shows, their teams have been gutted. Each lost one singer last week. And on Tuesday night, each lost another: Team Usher’s Bria Kelly and Team Shakira’s Tess Boyer failed to get the audience solidly behind them. That leaves each coach with only one remaining team member.

Teams Adam and Blake, meanwhile, are downright robust: three contestants apiece! Neither veteran coach has lost a team member, though Levine came close Tuesday night, when Kat Perkins landed in the bottom three -- punished, it seemed, for choosing a sedate sort of song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” to perform on Monday night. But Perkins will live to sing on next week: She was instantly saved via Twitter.

Perkins had earned the save with her seductive, rocked-out performance of Grace Potter & the Nocturnals’ “Paris (Ooh La La),” which she’d managed to make sound like her own even though it’s a singing-competition show staple.

“If that doesn’t buy you next week, I don’t know what the hell will,” Shelton told Perkins after she’d given the song her all.

Despite having a singer on the line himself, Usher called Perkins’ performance “electrifying.”

Levine made a promise to viewers that, if they saved Perkins, she would break the usual pattern of a singer being saved one week only to head home the following one. Instead, he vowed, Perkins would return to “go all the way.”

Kelly and Boyer also performed, and though their turns onstage did not earn them the save, they did garner praise from the coaches, especially their own.

Usher offered his tearful girl Bria a pep talk, telling her yet again that when the going got rough, the rough got going and adding, “You’re not defined by what somebody else says about you. What you are is amazing because you say you are.”

Shakira said she was “devastated” to see Boyer at risk of elimination again and begged her fans to “please save Tess.”

But the coaches’ hands were tied and the tweeters had their say.

Perkins will stay to sing with the rest of the Top 8 next week. Kelly and Boyer will head home.

Do you think the vote went the right way?

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