Just before The Roches was released, the singing and songwriting toasts of Greenwich Village played a small university in a Massachusetts manufacturing town. "Girls," the frats behind me sneered when they saw three slightly weird sisters carrying two acoustic guitars. "They can't even sing," the boys howled next as the trio skidded into the giddy, tinny harmonies of "We," their habitual opener (it begins The Roches as well): "We are Maggie and Terre and Suzzy...." Me, I was thinking about the culture gap, thinking that critics' darlings are often the public's scorn, that the sisters' strategy—part confrontation, part playing the klutz—was lousy. I could have saved myself the trouble. The Roches finished their first number to catcalls and a giggle or two, their last to a standing ovation—defying all logic and most expectation. Their album does the same.

The Roches is a collection of snapshots, some of them taken with a telephoto lens. There's "Mr. Sellack," in which a formerly confident artiste asks for her old (dreary, low-paid, steady) job back: "Waiting tables ain't that bad/Since I've seen you last, I've waited for some things that you would not believe/To come true." Or "The Troubles," in which somewhat more successful artists now about to travel weigh the pros ("We're going away to Ireland"), cons ("I hope they have health food in Dublin") and mixed blessings of embarkation ("We're leaving behind our boyfriends soon"). The Roches toss off that last line jauntily enough to suggest, with a wicked gleam, that it's more of a blessing than a mix. But by the final verse, the sisters have made the song—oh, perfect—into a round: anticipation turns into anxiety and then back into anticipation again.

Any similarity between characters in the songs and persons living is not coincidental. The singers are admirably quick with an accent or intonation: the crisp diction of fathers and mothers busy knowing best, the too-careful phrasing of husbands who should know better (but who fool around just the same). There are observations that women in particular can say right-on to—dumb but true flashes, like the way pocketbooks are impossible to manage if you're carrying anything else. Whether it's commuter-train seats or pop-music categories, the Roches don't fit easily into life's assigned slots. But then, who does? Their wryme style of beleaguered domestic reportage—a triptych of hipper, loonier Erma Bombecks—appeals to the misfit in all of us.

Appropriately enough, The Roches has been produced (by Robert Fripp) in what the label calls audio vérité—a truer phrase than high fidelity to describe the grainy texture of the voices caught here and enlarged. Maggie's grave and unexpected baritone, Suzzy's sweet and sour chatter, and Terre's upper register, mysteriously built of husks and reeds, are grouped together against a stark background where each quaver, rasp and perfect resolution seems magnified. Aside from the elder sisters' guitars, there's not much in the picture—once or twice a bass, sometimes far away an organ or some delicate kind of synthesizer. You hear everything: the string snapping against the fret, the indrawn breath, the whispered evidence that music is born of effort.

All this sounds so austere, and The Roches isn't. Instead, the LP is bright and magic and silly and rich. Though there are places on it where every trace of reverb has been wiped away, leaving individual voices almost wizened in the anechoic glare, you only have to wait for the harmonies (water to the thirsty), which are resonant with drawn-out notes (sweet sustenance), like indulgences or acts of grace. The sound of audio vérité may seem to say that realism, not romance, is what's important, yet the singers believe—no, they promise—that the two are indissoluble.

But if the low-rent ragtime of "Mr. Sellack" goes Hollywood-absurd when Maggie's voice drops to its knees to claim, "Give me a broom and I'll sweep my way to heaven," the Roches (as "Runs in the Family" says) are "pretty enough to play the fool." And smart enough to smudge the line between ultrahip and out to lunch—which doesn't make them just another cheap trick. In her floppy commune skirt and pixie-collared blouse, Maggie looks so natural: comfortable, though vaguely worried that her outfit isn't quite, well, like everyone else's. It's a shock to learn it's a costume she exchanges after the show for conventional sweater and slacks. And yet, the sisters' unworldliness isn't just an attitude pulled out of a traveling trunk for the occasion. I think they believe quite literally in miracles.

I mean, they've already pulled this loaves-and-fishes act with three voices and two guitars. They'll try anything: chant, drone, yodel. Their harmonies can be hearty as a glee club's or as strange as bagpipes and ancient harps. And it's not all electronics that makes the Roches sometimes sound like a crowd. Live, they do a seems-like-full-size "Hallelujah Chorus." Honest. On record, the more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts effect has something to do with the way they split up and attack from all sides, echoing the plaintiff in "The Married Men" ("Drop her a line, drop her a line") or nailing phrases, one over the other as if they were shingles, in "Quitting Time." You get that old contrapuntal motion rocking the boat, along with the solid reassurance of people holding onto their chords. Neat.

But to get back to the miracles. What the Roches do is put themselves in position—they sail right out into the mystic—in case one should occur. In "The Troubles," there's the way that all the doubts about traveling come down to a yen for strawberry-apricot pie. (Will we be able to get it? Can we live without it?) You'd call it whimsy or even cute, especially when the words are repeated at the end in a whisper. Except the archaic, maybe medieval, melody sounds as mysterious and solemn as an incantation. But I don't mean the pie is some kind of symbol—just a reassuring mouthful of home, safe home. A security blanket on a foreign bed.

It's no coincidence that so many of the songs on The Roches are about leaving homes (though not all the departures are literal, and some—like the trespasses in "The Married Men"—are costly strayings out of bounds). Leaving the familiar is laying yourself open for transformations: "If you go down to Hammond ... /That would be just/Throwing yourself away." Possibly, but the hypnotic guitar and shimmery voices argue that, in Hammond, you might be finding something brighter. Naturally, there's no guarantee, and no one's more deft than the Roches in spiking honeyed tones with vinegar. But still....

The Roches ends with a dizzy, spangled parable. The beat in "Pretty and High" goes oom-pah-pah, swinging like a buxom lady on a high trapeze, while a guitar plinks out a calliope tune. Illusions are in the air, and expectations are on the wire: "She came on the stage /In a dress like the sky.../And all of the people/Were charmed and surprised." And subsequently disappointed. They called the girl in the blue dress a liar, figuring her for a tease. But she's just a circus star.

"Pretty and High" is such a fine song about the uses and penalties of enchantment. Promise miracles—as an artist, lover or friend—and you're bound to be known as a deceiver. Yet the Roches keep insisting that you can be a clown and a bareback ballerina all at once. At the end, a voice (I think it's Terre's) answers the doubters and says everything I'd want to say about the album: it's "pretty and high and only partly a lie." Except I'd say, The Roches is almost too good to be true. (RS 292)

ARIEL SWARTLEY