Kris Allen
Kris Allen (Jive)

Adam Lambert
For Your Entertainment (RCA)

In some ways, it’s unfair to make a direct comparison between the major-label debuts of Kris Allen and Adam Lambert. The two are operating in separate subgenres of mainstream pop, after all, and both have taken pains to point out that there is no rivalry between them. Still, it’s inevitable that at this early stage of their careers, one’s success will be weighed against the other’s. The two went mike-to-mike at the end of American Idol’s eighth season, a mere six months ago. Lambert seemed to be favoured by the judges and critics, but, after the largest vote in the show’s history, Allen was declared the winner.

He was certainly the safe choice. A small-town boy from Arkansas with a smooth voice and puppy-dog eyes, the 24-year-old Allen seems like the kind of guy who would help an old lady cross the street, then walk her the rest of the way home, make her tea, and take her dog for a walk. In other words, he is anything but threatening. Lambert is a different story. A strutting glampire in coal-black guyliner, he won fans through a confidence that is apparently absolute, and a voice that, well, is a hell of a thing. During his Idol tenure, Lambert sang the bejesus out of everything he touched, and not always in a good way. His sweeping falsetto sometimes swept right out of the key the song was supposed to be in, but it indicated an impressive vocal range. Lambert came across as someone who possessed a potentially lethal weapon that he didn’t really know how to control.

It’s a considerably toned-down Lambert we hear on For Your Entertainment. For someone with so distinct a presence on-stage, he turns out to be something of a chameleon in the recording studio. Tackling numbers by such bankable hit-makers as Max Martin, Linda Perry, and Lady Gaga (and, um, Rivers Cuomo?), Lambert doesn’t so much mould the material to complement his voice as reshape his voice to suit each song. As a result, it’s sometimes too easy to tell who wrote what without even looking at the credits. This is the case with the Justin Hawkins–penned opening track, the admittedly awesome almost-rocker “Music Again”, in which Lambert indulges in a little Darkness-style falsetto. “Soaked”, meanwhile, was written by Muse’s Matthew Bellamy, and it’s a grandiose piano ballad that could have been included on The Resistance without anyone noticing that it was a different dude singing. (In other words, it sounds like Queen.)

Things never get quite as campy as the gay-Ken-doll cover art seems to promise, although the whip-crack electro of the title track comes close (and came even closer when Lambert performed it at the American Music Awards, simulated man-on-man knob-gobbling and all), and the Gaga-penned “Fever” carries a welcome bit of Scissor Sisters strut. Still, For Your Entertainment lives up to its title, and even when Lambert tries just a little too hard, he never gets boring.

The same can’t be said for Allen, but his general blandness is precisely why he holds so much appeal for strip-mall America, and it’s actually an asset when your target market is the same folks who spend their iTunes dollars downloading tracks by John Mayer and Rob Thomas.

But I don’t want to be too hard on the guy. He has a nice voice, and he uses it to deliver Maroon 5–lite funk-rock (“Can’t Stay Away”), melodically soaring piano pop (“Bring It Back”), and acoustic-strumming sing-alongs (“Alright With Me”). He does it all with equal conviction, and, unlike Lambert, he never gives the impression that he’s singing other people’s songs. In fact, Allen has the primary writing credit on nine of the disc’s 13 tracks. One of them, “Red Guitar”, is a solo composition, which not only shows that Allen knows his way around a metaphor, but also suggests he could do just fine without the help of all those well-remunerated song doctors.

Mind you, the album’s best track is one Allen didn’t write: a cover of Kanye West’s “Heartless”. Amusing as it is to hear Allen mouth a Kanye-ism such as “How could you be so Dr. Evil?”, he sells it with enough earnest soulfulness to make it his own. It’s still not quite as much fun as For Your Entertainment, though, so let’s give this round to Lambert.

Download This: Kris Allen's “Heartless”
                              Adam Lambert's “Music Again”