Prior to his big break on the seventh season of American Idol, David Cook was like many struggling regional rockers, rotating through a few bands, setting up camp in a few homes, writing originals along the way, sometimes getting enough tunes together to put out an album on his own. Once his first band, Axium, split after garnering a reasonable amount of attention -- they topped a local Kansas City poll and placed in a Got Milk contest -- he settled down in Tulsa, playing guitar with a group called Midwest Kings while also working on solo stuff, putting out an album called Analog Heart in 2006. Like many local records, it didn't get much play outside its region until it showed up on Amazon's MP3 store partway through the American Idol competition, when it was promptly pulled. Why was it pulled? Because American Idol and 19 Entertainment like to present their Idols as the product of immaculate conception, so they don't want any of their Idol prehistory on the market. Sometimes there are good reasons for this, but in the case of Cook, Analog Heart might have been pulled just because it would be a little too close to what he would do after the show. Anybody familiar with Cook's parade of post-grunge won't find this surprising -- it's stuck in the late '90s, positioned somewhere between 3 Doors Down and Third Eye Blind -- but the shock is that he sounds a lot more convincing when he isn't belting out covers of Our Lady Peace. Cook remains almost defiantly conventional, but he's singing these power ballads and vaguely inspirational anthems with earnest conviction, believing every cliché that passes through his lips and, more importantly, building the tunes upon seriously big arena hooks. It's still rather bland made-for-radio grunge-pop -- designed as much to be his entry into the big leagues as to actually be played on Top 40 -- but with a little gloss, the stuff on Analog Heart could sit alongside DAUGHTRY quite comfortably. And that's almost certainly why it was pulled -- there will be a time for David Cook to sit alongside DAUGHTRY and it's not the spring of 2008. It's the holiday season of 2008.