gripping new album, infusing it with a provocative, unnerving power.

First impressions of the album will not reveal those depths. As always, the Maniacs – guitarist Rob Buck, keyboardist Dennis Drew, bassist Steve Gustafson and drummer Jerome Augustyniak – style instantly appealing musical surfaces. Buck's playful fascination with the shimmering sounds that can be coaxed from a variety of stringed instruments – lap and pedal steel guitar, electric sitar, banjo, mandocello – lend enticing strangeness to the band's otherwise straightforward smart-pop arrangements. Merchant herself plays a good deal of piano on the album, and her simple, searching melodies evoke mystery and yearning.

Strings add luster to three tracks; bassoons turn up on another. The JB Horns strut their funky stuff on two songs – as a concept (Natalie Merchant as the hardest-working woman in showbiz?), the collaboration may sound contrived, but they pull it off with ease. And with alternative all-star Paul Fox handling production – replacing Peter Asher, who did In My Tribe (1987) and Blind Man's Zoo (1989) – the Maniacs are far less restrained, though no less disciplined.

Merchant's voice, of course, provides continual sensual pleasure. She is one of the rare singer-lyricists – Van Morrison and Michael Stipe also come to mind – who, while obsessed by what they have to say and by words themselves, exult in the sheer physical delight of making vocal sounds. Given the choice – though she would prefer not to have to make the choice – Merchant will always opt for pleasure over verbal meaning in rendering a vocal line, and rightly so. This makes her songs difficult to understand in literal terms but easy to respond to emotionally.

The emotions called forth, however, are not always to be trusted. Coupled with the appealing textural feel of the band's music, Merchant's instinct for joy provides a jarring complement to the frequent darkness of her themes and her occasionally chilly moral earnestness. In other words, the sonic allure of the Maniacs' music and Merchant's voice is a seduction into songs that are charged, complex and troubling.

As it typically does in Merchant's lyrics, biblical imagery runs throughout Our Time in Eden. That can give her songs the feel of parables, as do the questions that come up again and again, making