Talk On Corners – Duke Egbert

I had…and still have…high hopes for the Irish pop/rock/Celt
band The Corrs. When they’re on, their harmonies are brilliant;
Andrea, Sharon, and Caroline Corr have a preternatural ability for
haunting melodies, Sharon’s fiddle playing is magical, and John
Corr is a fine instrumentalist. Save for Canada’s The Rankins,
they’re the most talented Celt/pop vocal ensemble out there. So I
bought
Talk On Corners, their second CD, as soon as it came out —
and have played it perhaps three times since then.

Sophomore slump hits with a vengeance, and it’s a damned shame.
There’s no getting around it; on their first album, the Corrs were
an ethereal, richly harmonic band weaving pop sensibility with
traditional Irish melodies and instruments. On
Talk On Corners, they’re Riverdance meets Wilson Phillips,
and it’s enough to make you wince.

The lyrics, always the Corrs’ weakest part, have slipped into
insipidity at several points — “And I would be preening in
paradise // If I were always beside him like a Siamese…” Please.
This vapid, wide-eyed guy-worshipping mentality is laced throughout
the CD like the trail of a saccharine snail; it’s unworthy of the
talent, and more appropriate for the latest Britney N’Sync CD. If
this is what working with Carole Bayer Sager causes, I suggest an
antidote be worked out for the sake of humanity.

Another problem is a definite manifestation of too-many-cooks
syndrome. With seven producers for fourteen tracks, it’s impossible
to gain any sort of consistent sound from
Talk On Corners. Tracks like their cover of Fleetwood Mac’s
“Dreams” are the best reflection; why is it that a gorgeous cover
in three part harmony was sullied by a

drum machine
? And a badly programmed drum machine at that? John Corr can
program a drum machine — he did so on the Rankins’ “Weddings,
Wakes, and Funerals”. So why did producer Oliver Leiber screw it up
here? The Corrs should have stuck with a horse that runs and
retained former Chicago producer David Foster for all the tracks on
this CD, as they did on their first CD,
Forgiven Not Forgotten.

And finally, where are the instrumentals?
Forgiven Not Forgotten had four, including the brilliant
“Toss The Feathers”;
Talk On Corners has one, a pretentious Enigmaesque
drum-machine and synth thing called “Paddy McCarthy” that even
Sharon’s fiddle can’t save.

There
are some high points on here. The aforementioned “Dreams”
works despite the drum line; the opening track, “Only When I
Sleep”, is insistent and complex; “Queen Of Hollywood” has a
high-arching, driving melody, strong and powerful; and
surprisingly, the Corrs’ cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” is
pleasant and dreamy. The rest of the CD, though, is mostly musical
cream-of-wheat, bland, lumpy, and boring.

There’s a brilliant CD in the Corrs — they’ve got too much
talent to do otherwise. But this CD, scattered, unfocused, and
watered down, isn’t it; in fact, it’s a signpost towards the Wrong
Direction. Let’s hope the Corrs get back to their roots.