by: Doug Adrianson, Knight-Ridder Newspapers (section: Extra page: 1B)

It was exactly the kind of dive where you'd expect to find a rock band with a slashers-from-hell name like 10,000 Maniacs - a low-ceilinged black hole of noise, stale beer and well-seasoned sweat.

But the people who wedged into the Treehouse Lounge in Hallandale, Fla., that sweltering night in 1986 saw a show to remember.

Onstage, a slender, dark-haired waif in ballet slippers and a long, old-fashioned dress whirled and twirled and stared into infinity. In a rich and vaguely exotic voice, she sang odd songs about sitting in a cemetery and the little girl across the street.

The quintet backing her seemed to contradict her folkish melodies, stretching toward jazzy modern pop with ethereal electronic guitar lines shooting off into space and up-to-date synth sounds emanating from a beat-up keyboard.

One of the players occasionally strummed an acoustic guitar or mandolin, but the artistic sparks came from the tension between the modern electric band and the ancient-seeming soul of the hypnotic young singer.

The crowd was mesmerized.

Three years later, singer Natalie Merchant remembers that night, too.

"It was awful! There was a fight in the men's room. Steve (Gustafson, the bassist) walked in and there was a broken bottle on the floor with blood and hair and flesh on it. It shook us all up," Merchant, 26, said recently. "But that was probably the only place that would have us."

While hit singles remain elusive, the band (which comes to Charlotte's Ovens Auditorium Sunday) has matured steadily through three major-label albums. Its sound is one of the most distinctive in pop music, old yet new, accessible yet eerily haunting.

For the right reasons - hard work and persistence rather than luck, talent rather than marketing gimmickry - 10,000 Maniacs could be one of the most compelling bands of the '90s.

Trouble me, disturb me with all your cares and your worries, Merchant sings on the first single from Blind Man's Zoo.

But song after song, the album has the opposite effect. Merchant unburdens herself about unwanted teen pregnancy in Eat for Two, U.S. intervention in Central America (Please Forgive Us), the bitter legacy of Vietnam (The Big Parade), toxic waste (Poison in the Well), poverty (Dust Bowl), greed (The Lion's Share), imperialism in Africa (Hateful Hate), religious fanaticism (Jubilee) and more.

"I thought there should be unity to the album, and the songs that felt strongest were the darker, heavier ones," she said.

The songs succeed because of Merchant's gift for imagery - such as her description of widows and veterans searching the names on the Vietnam memorial wall as "the slowest parade they'll ever see" - and because of the music.

As always, the melodies and arrangements on Blind Man's Zoo were written mostly by the band - guitarist Rob Buck, keyboardist Dennis Drew, drummer Jerry Augustyniak and bassist Gustafson (guitarist-singer John Lombardo dropped out just as the band was gaining wide notice) - then presented to Merchant in demo-tape form.

The ones that inspired her to write lyrics became 10,000 Maniacs songs.

Like R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, with whom she became close when the bands toured together, Merchant is an introspective poet fronting a band of more or less normal guys.

It has been an odd match from the start.

At the dawn of the '80s, Drew and Gustafson took charge of the campus radio station at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, N.Y. Careening between punk and Grateful Dead, they managed to alienate just about all their listeners.

Then in walked Merchant, already in college at 16, with a stack of art-rock and reggae records. One night, solely because of her good looks and wild dancing in local clubs, the two guys invited her to come sing with their band, Still Life.

Merchant, a compulsive collector of funky old things, had just come from a secondhand shop where she had purchased a 1950s social-studies book with a chapter on Lapland. As the band played, she improvised a song called Reindeer Are the Cattle of Lapland.

She was in.

The contrast between the demure, vegetarian Merchant and the cut-up, freewheeling Maniacs is partly because of the age difference - the players are all five to 10 years older - but also to her upbringing.

Aside from starting college at 16, she grew up in a home without television.

"When I was about 11, my mother decided we were rotting from the inside out so she unplugged the TV and put it in the closet," she said. "It was a good thing. We got creative and found other things to do with our time."

Merchant did a lot of drawing and writing.

Today she still keeps her TV in the closet but tries to catch the news even when on the road.

She agrees that music, like TV and movies, can powerfully influence young minds, but disagrees that aggressive musical styles like rap or heavy metal do more harm than good.

"If you're a black kid growing up in a housing project in Chicago, rap is your poetry, your stance. It's a lot more meaningful to you than what Barry Manilow might do.

"There's always been corruption, pillage and rape. There's probably less now than 1,000 years ago. I'd have to say Hitler was more dangerous than Ozzy Osbourne." Whatever the alchemy of Merchant's words and the band's music, on stage she continues to be the riveting focus of 10,000 Maniacs.

She still spins and swoops while singing but rarely keeps her back to the crowd anymore.

"I had stage fright, but it's much easier now."