by: Timothy White

10,000 Maniacs make records that resemble radiant February days -- crisp, bracing, bittersweet in their strange starkness. The band spent this past winter at Dreamland Recording studios, a rustic former church in Woodstock, New York, making Blind Man's Zoo, the Maniacs' fifth and best release.

One recent wintry morning, Natalie Merchant, attired in rumpled brown sweater and skirt, pads through the kitchen of the farmhouse/rectory that connects to the church proper, munching on a huge glazed donut. "Should Eat For Two be the first single?" she wonders out loud, referring to a philosophical monologue about pregnancy. "Should the song begin the album, too? When do we have to decide this stuff?"

"After all the donuts are eaten!" a band member shouts from the pantry as another 10- to 12-hour workday on Blind Man's Zoo commences.

One by one, the group's sleepy-eyed players converge in the hallway, Robert Buck (guitars), Dennis Drew (keyboards), Steven Gustafson (bass) and Jerome Augustyniak (drums) slowly filing past a VCR flickering with a video by the Horseflies -- the Maniacs' favorite band -- and into the control room. Copper-haired Peter Asher greets them beside a window overlooking the choirloft and studio below. The veteran producer of James Taylor and Bonnie Rait has a scribbled agenda of tasks that includes overdubs to Dust Bowl, Lion's Share and Hateful Hate.

But first, there is a burst of rock fan fever. Although Asher piloted the Maniacs' breakthrough In My Tribe LP in 1987, they still regard the onetime folk-pop star with a measure of awe. "Would you consider signing this for me?" drummer Augustyniak asks, handing Asher a battered copy of Peter and Gordon's 1964 World Without Love. "I'm still very proud of those days," Asher assures Jerome, the rest of the Maniacs looking on with quiet envy.

Once the group takes their places inside the church sanctuary, stained glass-filtered sunshine splashing across their humming instruments, it is Asher who is dazzled. "No one else has anything like their distinctive sound," he enthuses, grinning, as the band begins an exquisite jam paced by Natalie's keen piano chords. "The music has a quality that really matches this place, a reverent feeling."

In a world where science ratifies magic while religion trivializes wonder, 10,000 Maniacs manage to express a poetic spirituality that is utterly personal. And Blind Man's Zoo perfects their approach. Eat For Two has a celebratory sense of urgency, all tendernesses and trepidation, with Robert Buck's clarion guitar and Augustyniak's percussion joined like the gears in some great musical clock. In contrast, The Big Parade, a moving evocation of a gallery of visitors to the Vietnam War Memorial, lends somber sweep to the wages of transgression.

As far back as the Maniacs' home-made Human Conflict Number Five EP, their sound described an elemental universe in which emotion, the material world and the forces of nature shared a fragile symbiosis; within this exotic cosmology, ordinary objects are as deeply mysterious as supernatural acts, and the feelings both can trigger become as real as steel. In My Tribe was the first Maniacs record to focus the anxiety and wistfulness that charged Secrets Of The I Ching and The Wishing Chair. On Blind Man's Zoo the arrangements are now flawless in their narrative drive and Merchant's imploring vocals achieve the horn-like clarity hinted at earlier.

The ultimate proof is found in new material as diverse as the propulsive Headstrong, the poignant Dust Bowl and Hateful Hate, a gripping lament keyed to tabernacle organ. Each is a self-contained tale that succeeds because its mood and imagistic lyrics are fused by Merchant's fervent bravado.

The record's crowning glories, however, are Jubilee, a chilling, hallucinatory tone-poem about the evils of zealotry, and Trouble Me, a lovely ballad of self-doubt in which Merchant's crystalline soliloquy is shaded by superb gospel harmony from Javetta Steele.

All in all, Blind Man's Zoo is an intuitive triumph from one of America's most original bands, its metaphysical grace drawn from the discovery of its own inner resources.

During one of the last evenings of 10,000 Maniacs' stay at Dreamland, the sun dips behind the lower Catskills just as Natalie Merchant again takes to the grand piano in the main studio to plot the melody of an untried song called News. It has a passionate but stately tone, like the burning memory of a terrible loss.

"That's unforgettable," says Peter Asher in a hush.

He pushes the control room's talk back button to speak to Merchant, asking, "What are the words? Shouldn't you sing a bit of the vocal to help us see the song's structure?"

She smiles with a cryptic sadness and says a barely audible "No. It's not ready yet."

Blind Man's Zoo doesn't contain News. Maybe next February.