Lest 10,000 Maniacs be mistaken for members of the SoHo establishment, check your map: the sextet's home base, Jamestown, New York, is roughly the same distance from the Big Apple as Richmond, Virginia. And contrary to what some may think, parts of the vast Empire State are profoundly dissimilar to Mayor Koch's domain. So when Natalie Merchant sings of train tracks, sawdust and rusty barrels, it's...

It's easy to polish the furniture or feed the baby while listening to a 10,000 Maniacs album, which is both the group's saving grace and its biggest shortcoming. Earnest and well intentioned to a fault, singer Natalie Merchant covers all the politically correct topics in her songs, but she does so to the breeziest sort of New Age pop, as on the band's 1987 breakthrough album, In My Tribe. As a...

10,000 Maniacs have always been a precocious band, with a sound and a sensibility far wiser than their years. But with In My Tribe, the group has finally come into maturity. It isn't simply that the songs are richer and more resonant this time around; the band itself seems to have grown. From the opening chords of "What's the Matter Here?" it's clear that the Maniacs' approach has been refined....

Our Time In Eden': the title is an imagined memory as well as the statement of a Utopian ideal. In the vision of Natalie Merchant, the singer and primary songwriter of 10,000 Maniacs, the high-minded belief that somehow life – and our individual lives within it – is perfectible battles a deeper, Catholic assumption that we are fallen beings and no amount of effort on our part can re-crea...