Girls' night out for heartthrob lite

"The men don't know," a great bluesman once wrote. "But the little girls understand."

And, at the risk of sounding elitist or condescending or whatever adjective you might choose to affix to it, that pretty much sums up the way I feel about last night's 98 Degrees show at Barrymore's.

You want the critic's view? Here it is: This Ohio quartet -- the latest pack of young 20-somethings to come down the same pipe that brought us The New Kids On The Block, the Backstreet Boys, Boyzone and the rest of our current crop of "boy groups" -- comes across live exactly as you'd expect an act that cut its chops playing cheerleading camps, amusement parks and a Seventeen magazine-sponsored mall tour would.

That is to say, they're talented karaoke performers with pin-up-boy good looks and nice voices who can captivate a 98%-female room of (barely) teenagers with an hour's worth of slick harmonies and canned backing tracks, a bit of MuchMusic-ready choreography and a couple of costume changes. An exceptionally dreamy barbershop quartet, if you will, that puts a wholesome, white face on a genre established and brought to gleaming perfection by a couple of generations of African-American performers ranging from The Temptations (whom 98 Degrees cover in concert) to contemporary inspirations like Boyz II Men.

But what do I know?

I defy you to find another act -- save perhaps the aforementioned Backstreet Boys -- who've enticed an Ottawa crowd to such a shrieking fever pitch in months. Hell, years: I mean, we're dealing with a packed house that was screaming loud enough to draw blood for the poor roadie who emerged on stage before the show to drop off a handful of water bottles. Even the Tragically Hip doesn't play that well here.

And judging by the rosily contented faces milling about in the bar after the show, it was noise well spent.

What did they get? The group's self-titled album, basically, performed live in front of its own larger-than-life likeness hung on a photographic banner.

The show opened with the foursome clustered like a sports team stageside and crooning an a capella excerpt from its hit, Invisible Man. The boys then hit the stage dramatically -- in matching, red long-sleeve 98 Degrees T-shirts and baggy, white Polo pants -- to rhyme through the crowd-pleasing hip-hop-lite of Come And Get It.

From then on, it was a bunch of treacly, largely indistiguishable (and, with all the racket, unintelligible) lover-man ballads dedicated -- as was, for example, Don't Stop The Love -- "to all the ladies in the house," broken up by the odd, R&B-flavored dance number and even a soulful, a capella Christmas carol (Silent Night). Only the stage banter ("We're all from Ohio. We're all very, very single. We love Canada. We're also very romantic guys."), accompanied by some well-timed long-stemmed rose distribution, managed to elicit more fervent approval from the crowd.

Tom Jones couldn't have set a room more afire. If you were over, say, 14 and male, you probably didn't get it.

But oh, well, whatever. Nevermind. It was worth going just to see Barrymore's -- a room best known in previous incarnations for surly drunks, barroom brawls and stage diving -- transformed into a seething mass of boiling hormones. And, admittedly, it was hard to stand amidst that much excitement (I swear, the girl next to me doubled over in a near faint when Jeff and Nick came out sporting overalls and no shirts) and not catch a hint of the buzz yourself.

It'll at least keep lunch hour buzzing until the real deal -- next month's Backstreet Boys show at the Corel Centre -- arrives in town.