The Corrs

Like their stateside sisters the Dixie Chicks, the Corrs have watched their commercial success grow as they've pruned the traditional musical elements that originally defined them from their sound. Borrowed Heaven, the photogenic family group's fourth studio album, contains traces of their Irish heritage, but the flavor's never more prevalent than the globe-tripping exotica you'll find spicing up any number of current hip-hop and R&B hits. In "Angel," a grooving acoustic ballad here, the carefully layered vocal harmonies briefly part for a jaunty tin whistle lick; a stately string arrangement simmers beneath the sparkling arena-pop guitars in "Long Night." But as with the Chicks and Shania Twain, whose studio-perfectionist husband "Mutt" Lange produced 2000's In Blue, nothing about the Corrs' internationalist agenda lessens their music's slick pleasures. In fact, it bolsters them: Opener "Summer Sunshine" weds tinkly Enya pianos to a surging chorus Sheryl Crow probably thought she wrote, and "Time Enough for Tears," which Bono co-wrote for the film In America, refigures Van Morrison's woozy soul-pop for the ADD-afflicted jet set.