"That is an odd, embarrassing name," Natalie Merchant, the voice of 10,000 Maniacs admits. But the little band from Jamestown, New York, with the big bad reputation (Peel pick of '83) has every other reason to be proud.

They've chin-upped their way above the scattershot American independent recording scene with a seductive blend of island rhythms and folkie melodics and built a loyal following across the Eastern seaboard from their native upstate New York to Athens, Georgia, the birthpiace of obvious peers R.E.M. And like Mike Stipe and his crew, 10,000 Maniacs specialise in great melodies, great guitarists and great songs. And with lead singer and lyricist Natalie Merchant at the helm, 10,000 Maniacs have a mission: "I'd like people to learn," she declares, "I've found out how overwhelming the media is and the way it drills things into your head, it's almost like mind control. If I could control people's minds, I'd like to put something useful in."

"Like the song Tension just began as a poem I wrote sitting in my grandparents' house. I think a lot of elderly people are neglected by their families and even though I spend a lot of time with my grandparents, there was this period last winter when they couldn't shovel their sidewalks and I was just too selfish to walk six blocks and do it for them. That's a small thing really, but it's better than singing a song about going out to a club and getting it on or getting it up."

From such molehills are mountainous statements like My Mother The War made. Merchant's pop-calypso singing works in corrosive counterpoint to the sweet lilting interplay of guitarist Robert Buck and fellow guitar-bassists John Lombardo and Steve Gustafson. The result is sometimes quite like Debby Harry fronting a folked-up New Order, a vocal comparison that Natalie pooh-poohs "just because we both have a contralto voice. I'd much rather be compared to Nico."

It's not such a weird notion. Natalie's sweet trilling is miles from brooding melancholy, but the way she crams words and syllabuses into a rush of sound is reminiscent of the German songstress's intonations. Her choirgirl chirp adds a chilling irony to the politically aware lyrics, transforming art content into pop form in a way that the Gang Of Four could only dream of. "I have a voice and a mind," she says, "and it's mine, that's the way I speak. I'm not going to contrive some demented angry voice, because even though the words may be horrific, there's always been poetry about awful occurrences."

As a live act, there's precious little contrivence to 10,000 Maniacs. They're too naive and musically involved to put on a lousy show as yet, and to blase New York audiences it's terribly endearing. Natalie twirls around like an autistic ballerina and jiggles a cardboard marionette with absolute self-absorption, the kind of behaviour that launches 10,000 cults. The guitars and Dennis Drew's keyboards shimmer and rage, achieving a positively epic drive with Jerome Augustyniak's muscular skin bashing on a Hemingwayesque tune called Death of Manolete.

Success won't likely spoil a band who are able to transform a nuclear war message song like Grey Victory into compulsively cheery pop. "The way we just serenely abandon ourselves to the fact that there are billions of dollars worth of nuclear weapons on both fronts is insane," Natalie explains. "There's no way my writing a song is gonna change it, but that's what I think about all day long sometimes and I want other people to know it."