The Voice Recap: Neil Salsich Advances Under Unexpected Circumstances

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Casey Durkin/NBC

Neil Salsich, frontman for The Mighty Pines, is competing on The Voice.

St. Louis’ Neil Salsich was the first contestant to appear on the current season of The Voice, where he received a four-chair turnaround and jumped onto Team Blake. It has been an agonizing four-week wait to see him on the show again. 

Salsich finally appeared last night on the fourth of four Battle Round episodes, during which contestants duet together in a do-or-die sing-off. The winner advances to next week’s Knockout Rounds. The loser goes home. 

So after a month-long buildup, Salsich’s Battle Round moment proved anticlimactic. Not that Neil didn’t advance to the Knockouts. He did. It’s that there ended up being no battle at all, which robbed us of both a full Neil performance and of the customary behind-the-scenes footage of his preparations for the performance and interactions with his coach. 

Turns out, his battle partner, Alex Whalen, an outlaw-country yokel with a Willie Nelson braid growing out of his chin, didn’t show up for the battle at all. Shelton said that Whalen had “personal reasons” for bowing out of the competition, but here at Neil News, we believe Whalen was simply scared shitless to go tonsil-to-tonsil with Salslich and that he ran back to Florida with his little Willie between his legs. 

After all, Whalen’s blind audition — a pedestrian walk through Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make it Through the Night” — demonstrated that Whalen would be no match for Salsich’s versatility and charisma, particularly when asked to switch to singing a Marvin Gaye classic, which was the task at hand. 

So Salsich sang “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” by himself, something of a formality, and he was clearly relaxed given his unobstructed path to the next round — bouncing around, flirting with the judges and hitting sporty notes in the melody. 

By the way, what was with Neil’s getup? The newsboy caps are a Salsich trademark, but with a tweed blazer and vest, he went full British professor last night, a vision in pecan, like he was headed to a William Blake poetry reading. I kept expecting him to pull out a Calabash pipe at some point. 

Vocally, we got about 30 seconds of his performance, and he sounded great, Neil-ing it up in his fashion, and he would have smoked Whalen had the chickenshit actually shown up. 

Blake was proud of his boy, Niall praised him, Chance laughed with glee and Kelly stood and clapped along. 

So it was smooth sailing through this round. Tune in next week when Neil will have his hands full with real competition, and we finally get to hear him sing a full song on the show. 

In the meantime, you can hear him sing a whole bunch of songs — in the flesh — tonight at 9 p.m. at Broadway Oyster Bar (736 South Broadway) as part of the Voodoo Players pay tribute to The Band. Cover is $14.