The Corrs’ fourth studio outing finds them understandably reluctant to tinker with the formula that has, at the last count, shifted 30 million albums — and has, it is reasonable to extrapolate, soundtracked upwards of 100 million dinner parties, generally appearing with the dessert, in between Dido and Texas. Borrowed Heaven, like all previous Corrs recordings, is at pains to offer little that is strident or potentially disruptive; as ever, the Corrs’ crisp drums and clean guitars sound less like rock’n’roll than gently clinking cutlery.

Borrowed Heaven could, therefore, be easy to write off as colour-by-numbers radio rock. Certainly, the first single, opening track and shortly-to-beinescapable global hit, Summer Sunshine, gives no indication that the Corrs have any loftier ambitions: a winsome, unassuming verse leads to a surging but curiously polite and underwhelming chorus. It’s a pattern that the Corrs have no embarrassment about returning to, again, and again: Angel, Hideaway , Even If.

Listeners could be forgiven for thinking that they’ve pressed the “Repeat” key by mistake. It’s almost annoying, then, that Borrowed Heaven does have a compelling and redeeming quality, in that on a couple of occasions it combines Andrea Corr’s crystalline voice with songs that it actually deserves. The ballad Long Night, accidentally or otherwise, makes a virtue of its melodramatic overproduction, and the Cowboy Junkies-ish Time Enough for Tears, written by Bono, Gavin Friday and Maurice Seezer, is a plunge into the rarely plumbed depths of Andrea’s formidable possibilities as a singer.

Andrew Mueller

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