It really is time someone said it. The Corrs are the best pop band Ireland has ever produced. No, they are not rock 'n' roll. Nor are they traditional Irish musicians, by any stretch of the imagination. But does that make their music any less valid? Certainly not.

In Blue is The Corrs' best album to date. It is also their most true - true, that is, to their own family history, emotional lives, social excesses, sense of celebrity and love affairs. It is the album that will either silence the band's severest critics or reveal these critics to be so prejudiced and myopic that they simply can't see the wood from the trees. With In Blue, The Corrs have finally come of age.

In Blue isn't without flaws. There's an almost mechanical quality about Mutt Lange's production patterns on the radio-friendly 'Breathless',' All The Love In The World' and 'Irresistible' - but those tracks, tellingly, are the album's most predictable and superficial. Left alone, or with various other collaborators taking co-production credits, The Corrs really do explode towards sunlight like flowers kept too long in the shadows, composing, producing, playing and singing their hearts out on chillingly emotional cuts such as 'No More Cry'. Written about, to and for their recently deceased mother, it is probably their finest song yet. Transcendent in tone and complex in structure, it is flawlessly interpreted by Andrea.

That said, common to nearly all songs on this album - well titled In Blue - is a sense of sadness, heartbreak, disillusionment and a questioning of the transient and insubstantial nature of fame. Or rather, how unfulfilling fame can be, without true love.

That line itself may seem excessively sentimental - but sometimes the purest longing can be expressed in the simplest of terms. And pure longing sits at the soul of this album.

And yet the Corrs are natural pop writers, fleshing out their songs with hook-laden melodies, and in a manner that's reminiscent of Abba, managing to sound joyful even when they sing about despair. Songs like 'Hurt Before' are totally authentic attempts at self-expression. And on 'One Night' - not, needless to say, Presley's positively phallic song of the same name - they even manage to sound carnal.

In fact, reading between the lines on this album, one suspects a lot more has happened to The Corrs, in terms of life experiences, than they dare talk about in public. Some day they may address these issues. But till then, they can sing about them, in a coded way, in these songs.

In Blue also proves there is far more to the band than many people may have suspected. Far more, too, than the stereotypical beauty so many critics, and even music fans, seem to find it hard to see beyond.

In Blue may be the album to confirm The Corrs as one of the top pop bands in the world. Deservedly so.