Atlantic
Pop, 2000

The most beautiful sisters in pop (according to some people) and one… uh, okay-looking brother called The Corrs are back! Purists may frown at the increasing loss of Irish folk influences in the Corrs’s music (not that there aren’t that many influences in the first place), since In Blue sees the siblings trying out all sorts of genre from reggae-lite to R&B-lite.

But me, I think these sounds are a far cry from the boring, limpid MOR ballads that plagued Talk on Corners. Breathless and No More Cry, with their Fleetwood Mac-like sounds, are too catchy for words. Here Andrea Corr’s pleasant but thin vocals shine as she teases and plays me along into bopping my head to their song. And in the really fun Give It All Up, she sounds as if she’s singing through a phone, and the song is infectiously cute. But really, Breathless is definitely one of the best pop tune I’ve heard in ages, with a fun chorus and beautiful harmonies from the other siblings in a really great hook. And the closing instrumental piece Rebel Heart is beautifully done without degenerating into elevator muzak territory.

Fun buoyant pieces like Irresistible and Say make boring ballads like All the Love in the World and Somebody for Someone forgivable. But the really dire One Night is a heinous piece of dirge indeed – thank God for the skip button.

In Blue has The Corrs trying out all sorts of sounds. They don’t actually do it so drastically as to alienate purist fans, of course, but by going everywhere here, they actually end up somewhere okay.