PADDYWHACKED!

One whiff of The Corrs' petticoats (or in Jim's case, boxer shorts) and most cultural commentators and pop psychologists start talking through the wrong orifice. The self-styled alternative intelligentsia vilify the group for what they see as a lack of depth or credibility, while their champions tend to reject any criticism of the group as begrudgery, citing for the defence such nebulous notions as hard graft and success-as-its-own-end.

Small forests have been levelled in the name of analysing the Corrs phenomenon, yet there is nothing at all phenomenal about the group's success. They are a ruthlessly professional, talented, hard-working, good-looking quartet from Dundalk - why wouldn't they sell tons of records? Fact is, most of the phenomenology angle still stems from a 1980s-derived sense of Aren't We A Great Little Race All The Same, and the often spiteful criticism they inspire is merely the reverse negative of such boosterism; the carps of bitter little anoraks still smarting from the fact that critically lauded acts such as The Stars of Heaven and The Blades never made it outside of Dublin.

The Corrs have little to do with the trad Irish or rock 'n' roll lineage they are so often associated with, and belong more to the West Coast American pop tradition of groups like Fleetwood Mac, The Bangles and The Go-Gos, right back to The Mamas And Papas. Occasionally, on a tune like 'What Can I Do' or the Blondie-esque 'No More Cry', the shiny pop façade will crack and you'll get a glimpse of the warmth and tragedy in Andrea Corr's voice, a feeling that evokes latter day Abba or Karen Carpenter. Indeed, their finest song, 'Radio', boasts the kind of obliquely potent melody REM might produce on a good day.

That said, the band's Faustian pact with big bucks producer Mutt Lange on their most recent album In Blue has resulted in some of the quirkier and more pleasingly idiosyncratic aspects of the group's sound evident on the Unplugged session - Caroline's drumming for instance - being ironed out in favour of a rather obvious Shania Twain sheen. This compromise is paying off big time in the US, but the band have forfeited a little of their souls in the process, signified by the hi-gloss but corny promo video for 'Breathless'.

The group's cover of Fleetwood Mac's 'Dreams' in 1998 was a shrewder move, filling in the blanks for slower scribes: this was a music unashamedly based on sun-kissed harmonies, drive-time tempos, uncontroversial sentiments and glossy production. The only Mac factor missing was the Californian coke excess and who's-been-sleeping-in-my-bed soap opera sub-plots. But then, illicit trysts between three sisters and a brother really would be the stuff of tabloid wet dreams - not that various sources haven't already tried that angle, with even 'respectable' music publications remarking on the similarity between Jim's on/off girlfriend Andrea Roche and the Corr sisters. Hey, if you can't unearth a little incestuous frisson, invent it.

But of all the press cuttings gathering dust in a filing cabinet in The Corrs' publicity office, the review of the band's London Wembley Arena show (broadcast live on Sky Digital before Christmas) by Burhan Wazir in The Observer last December 24 constitutes possibly the sloppiest Corrs critique you'll read this season.

The piece, which included customary swipes at the group's lack of "soul" (a much invoked but seldom quantified quality), left no cliché uncovered, from Andrea "sashaying" across the stage singing in a "diva-esque" voice to Sharon's "immaculately tailored tresses" to Caroline playing drums "as if she's hoping to win an audition with Iron Maiden". Jim, true to form, didn't get so much as a namecheck.

In principle I agree with some of Wazir's nit-picks. While it's true that television can render the grimiest of rock 'n' roll acts sterile, Corrs shows always seem excessively slick and squeaky clean, rarely conveying any of the sensual melancholia at the heart of songs like 'Only When I Sleep' and 'Radio'.

So it's not the substance - scant though it is - of Wazir's hatchet job that rankles, it's the tone. For instance, as a preface to an irrelevant sidebar waffle about Scottish group Big Country, the reviewer delivered the mother of all post-colonial clangers, proclaiming that "the violin and tin whistle instrumentals prove annoying: co-opting British regional music into mainstream pop is almost always a bad idea."

Wouldn't you love to hear Christy Moore or Van Morrison's response to that one?

Perhaps, by extension, Mr Wazir would also prefer that the sitar, tabla and dabuka be banned from records by Roni Size and Asian Dub Foundation, or that the banjo be banished back to Appalachia.

But perhaps the real sleight was hidden in the review's subheading, which read as follows: "It's not that the Corrs are dreadful, but they really ought to do something about the people who attend their gigs".

Well pardon me for breathing. The Observer's readership would never be considered so gauche, so terminally middle-class, so culturally bankrupt, now would they?