The Corrs Album: “Best of the Corrs [DVD]”

I finally got around to "The Best of the Corrs: The Videos" after having watched several of their concerts on DVD, so it is not surprising that watching the group do music videos is not as much fun as watching them in concert. Nor is it surprising that the two videos I enjoyed the most are the pair from "MTV Unplugged" where they are singing live. "Radio" is pretty good, but "Everybody Hurts" is the standout piece in the collection and one of those tracks that provides justification for fans to pick up the entire DVD. Simple acoustic guitar from Jim and nice harmonies on the violin from Sharon, with Caroline on bongo drums, excellent supporting organ work, and Andrea's best vocals make this a superb cover (their best, which is saying something).

Artistically only a couple of the videos make a really good impression. "Forgiven, Not Forgotten" starts with some bothersome vertical lighting, but the setting for the Corrs to perform in looks a lot better, and the juxtaposition to the snow covered trees works well. Besides, there is not enough bodhrán playing in most music videos. "Only When I Sleep" makes use of a big formal room as another nice setting for the Corrs to perform, and then there is the ever bigger space of the abandoned factory in "I Never Loved You Anyway," but Andrea's blue eye shadow is a bit of a distraction.

"Dreams" takes place outside and inside an oriental restaurant, with nice opulent color contrasts between the black dresses and the red of the restaurant, just like the techno beat contrasted with Andrea's vocals and Sharon's fiddle playing. "Give Me a Reason" has some of the best looking images and a giant reduction in the amount of cutting we usually get with this videos makes this one of the more interesting ones visually. Lots of elegant shots of the Corrs to go along with Jim smashing a window and the white horse galloping down the hallway.

Usually, they can never seem to really figure out what to do for images in terms of the song lyrics. The first "Runaway" video makes it such a sad song, which is never the way it is performed in concert. One of the highpoints of a Corrs concert is when Andrea stands there in front of a crowd and sings "make love to me through the night." As compared to some of these other videos the crowded living room the band is crammed into does not work and there are just way too many disjoined settings cut together in this video. After their car breaks down the Corrs do some walking down the road in "What Can I Do," which always looks good, but by the time they start playing their instruments in the middle of nowhere there is no real narrative purpose. The images in "Breathless" do not make sense in terms of the song either, but Sharon and Caroline exchange some nice glances while singing backup.

Then there are the really modern looking videos, as with the floating bubble and black & white floor tile of "The Right Time," and the skyscrapers of "So Young," although the blue and white working off of the black we get visually does not really fit the song. In "Irresistible" you again have the Corrs in the big steel city, with lots of bright color lights, none of which adds anything to the song. Sometimes they just shoot the Corrs before and doing a concert as in "Love to Love You" and the black & white remix of "Runaway," which still sounds a bit too sad. "All the Love in the World" has as many clips from the movie "America's Sweethearts" as it does of the Corrs, although the idea that Julia Roberts is the fifth Corrs is interesting.

At the end of the DVD we get a big contrast between "Would You Be Happier?" where the group gets marketed as a heavy metal band and as a slinky girl group backing up their rapster brother, and the more somber narrative of "One Night," which shows that you can come up with a dramatic way of doing a Corrs song. But on balance these videos are a lot better to listen to than they are to look at, which I have no problem doing since the sound on a DVD usually seems better than the sound of a CD. Go figure.