Fascinating Friction

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: 10,000 MANIACS

ALBUM: OUR TIME IN EDEN

LABEL: ELEKTRA

THE BOTTOM LINE: Sandblasted lyricism and a new rhythmic restlessness carry this band to its best album yet.

Careful: you are about to be disoriented. Consider, first, the music of 10,000 Maniacs, which is spectral and delicate without a moment of fragility. Then think about the lyrics, which insinuate themselves into the subconscious like a waking dream. And finally, ponder lead singer, key writer and prime mover Natalie Merchant, whose earthbound strength sets up a fascinating friction with the impregnable magic of the music. She's a private writer in a public forum, taking flight into her own memories and fancies. She's -- here's the tough part -- like Willa Cather at a microphone, summoning memories of the open plains and the parched spirit.

You can hear the prairie spaces and the melancholy of divided lives that were Cather's true territory in Maniacs songs like Stockton Gala Days and Gold Rush Brides. "Who were the homestead wives?" the latter asks. "The land was free, yet it cost their lives . . . In letters mailed back home her Eastern sisters they would moan as they would read accounts of madness, childbirth, loneliness and grief." The words are printed like this in the album notes, as if they were bits of homespun prose from some cosmic farmer's almanac; but Merchant sings them with dreamy, insistent fervor, like a reverie from O Pioneers! Or maybe Wisconsin Death Trip.

Producer Paul Fox has given the band a more solid rhythmic foundation for this outing. Previously, Merchant and the other Maniacs could be so evanescent that they threatened to disappear in their own vapor trail. Here they sound sturdier, even when a string quartet floats through Merchant's wrenching Jezebel.

For all the smooth fury of Our Time in Eden, the spirit of the group -- its distinctive combination of stylistic orneriness and sandblasted lyricism -- remains undiminished. 10,000 Maniacs has always been hard to classify. That's an integral part of the band's charm, and so is the obvious pride with which its members nourish their idiosyncrasy. Still, they have enjoyed a heartening commercial success, which should increase nicely with Our Time in Eden. It sounds like their best album yet. But for a group that exists so safely away from trends, it's the afterlife of the music that counts; not the initial impact but the resonance. By that measure, 10,000 Maniacs still has a lot of distance to cover, and lots of time.