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The Corrs

Date: 22/07/2000

You shouldn't feel bad if you hate The Corrs. Hating The Corrs is natural, almost reflexive.

They're too good-looking, too squeaky clean, too ubiquitous, too successful, too much of everything, really.

The problem, however, is that it's hard to sustain hating The Corrs.

That is not to say that you would necessarily find reason to love what they do, but rather that there isn't enough reason to work up a sweat over them. After all, they rarely do.

With the big love ballad, All The Love In The World, they could be singing about their favourite pashmina for all the emotion we get.

Even with a Shania Twain-ready vaguely sexy snack such as Breathless, which opens the album, they sound pristine. (Breathless is one of three songs that The Corrs co-wrote with Twain's producer/husband Mutt Lange.)

The Corrs don't want your sex; they want your buttered Arrowroot, please. Which is why when you come across something like Somebody For Someone, you have to check yourself. The setting is as glossy and characterless as usual, but the lyrics have a darker spin.

There's a deep girl in the corner shop/selling sugar for money in the dead of the night ... and she's crying with a stranger for someone to love/and she sings/look at me, see me look at me, save me/free me'.

Golly, is that a genuine emotion there?

There's another such mom-
ent late in the album with No More Cry, a song they wrote for their father after the death of their mother.

With a jangling 12-string Rickenbacker-like riff and a chorus that bursts like your first bite into a ripe nectarine, it's musically a kick in the pants. But lyrically, too, it finds an emotional truthfulness, starting with, I wanna feel just like before/Before the rain came in my door/shook me up turned me around and then cutting through the surface cliché as they sing, I'm telling you: I'm smiling for you only/I'm trying for you solely.

If there is little to challenge across the album, it would be churlish not to recognise that At Your Side is nonetheless
a classy pop song that will grate only after several months of repeated radio play and that the extra track, the elegant and sombre Judy, deserves attention. And even more churlish not to admire the atmosphere generated in the instrumental Rebel Heart, which is the first time that the folk instrumentation that occasionally pops up (usually late in a song) feels natural rather than forced.

- Bernard Zuel

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