Natalie Merchant

First as lead singer and songwriter of 10,000 Maniacs and then as a solo artist, Natalie Merchant tapped into a hunger for literate, sometimes mystical singer/songwriter music. Her songs exuded enough pop gloss to land on the radio, but they were also reflective and full of emotional nuance, a combination that established Merchant as one of the guiding lights of the sensitive-gal Lilith Fair explosion of the mid-'90s.

Even before the Maniacs dissolved, Merchant was writing ambitious, unconventional material like "Noah's Dove" (from the band's 1992 swan song Our Time in Eden), which made good use of her porcelain voice and exotic lyrical imagery. She didn't tinker much with that approach on her solo debut, Tigerlily: While the hit "Carnival" suggests a goosed, more produced Maniacs, the album's elegies and lamentations, notably the eight-minute "I May Know the Word," catch the wistful, inward-looking mood to which her audience had become accustomed.

On Ophelia, though, Merchant made conscious changes. Electric guitar, previously used sparingly, is the disc's defining instrument, and the rhythms have a more rocklike assertiveness. A conceptual gallery of strong female archetypes, the album is less consistently engrossing than Merchant's previous work but nonetheless offers several artistic departures, including the ersatz spiritual "When They Ring the Golden Bells." Motherland, which follows the relatively predictable live set, is more repetitive, pointing Merchant to places she'd visited -- more persuasively -- before. (TOM MOON)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide