10,000 Maniacs

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 result, the Jamestown, New York, quintet... More >

Natalie Merchant has her own prosaic prosody, with off-kilter guitar accentuating its eccentric undertow. The whole second side makes politics not love, and sometimes--like when the lottery-playing mom of "Dust Bowl" rubs her fevered youngest down with rubbing alcohol--she brings you there. But somehow I knew that when she got down to cases she'd still be a fuzzy-wuzzy. This is a woman whose song about Africa (called "Hateful Hate," now there's a resonant phrase) brushes by slavery on its way to elephanticide and ends up condemning "curiosity"--again and again. No wonder she won't listen to "common sense firm arguments." (Grade: B-)