Natalie Merchant sometimes frowns, just to locate the thought, then tells you something sudden and unexpected.

"I had this waking dream," she briskly reveals. "In the dream, I was sleeping and you were screaming outside my door. I couldn't hear you. It was that sort of scream. You had short hair."

I was just about to say that I had this dream about waking up in bed and finding a typewriter next to me. Nothing strange about that you must think. Yeah, but half its keys were missing. The comma and the full-stop were two of them. I'd written this 3,000-word feature on 10,000 Maniacs, one sprawling sentence. One long adjective. One long scream. That's the way it goes. It was some dilemma. I was trying to say that 1O,000 Maniacs make you feel that you are living in a whirl but the "P" was missing. That's life you might say. That's life I say.

Words amaze you, don't they?

"I'm pretty involved with them. Language, on the whole is pretty amazing, This is just one language. I always used to dream of speaking every language in the world fluently. To just wake up one morning and understand everyone. I don't really talk that much . I'm really uncomfortable with my speaking voice. I always to explain what my accent is."

Natalie is struggling to explain something in a Kensington hotel room, two small hours after dreaming about my scream. She drank too much lager last night. I'm being gentle.

"In the summer, I found it in the countryside. I found a pond where I'd go swimming every day. Then I'd go picking berries. It sounds so insane."

It sounds quite perfect.

"I rode my bicycle a lot."

Does life disappoint you a lot?

"Yeah, it does."

Are you passive about it?

"No, I'm passionate about it."

Is it as charismatic as great art?

"Well, art to me is getting pretty violent, especially in America. Realistic art. Super-realistic art. That's always made me really uncomfortable. They almost look like enlarged snapshots of hamburger joints and drive-in movie theaters. There's a lot of primitive styles too, but a lot of those are mixed with this kind of urban anxiety. A lot of art trends stem from urban environments where people are frustrated, crowded in and threatened. I always thought of art as a way to communicate and a way of putting beauty into the world, perhaps to ease people's minds."

Is 10,000 Maniacs a soft revenge on the world, soft like a tongue against flesh, like seduction?

"Perhaps we try to make it more pastoral.."

Or re-making your worlds?

"That would be something. That's a great kind of power and, like any power, it can be benevolent or vicious."

People keep trying to steal your innocence...

"Yeah, that's true. I also meet people who tell me things I'm not sure I want to know. You learn so much that way though. Maybe there's the safety of knowing that this is a stranger and I can lie as much as I want and they can't really check up on me. I guard my innocence somewhat and that comes through in the songs. People don't like innocence in anything. Some people are so perverse, they don't like innocence in children. They want people to be born adults, born disillusioned.

"If I'm sitting by a railroad track or going through an alley and I hear a voice behind me and turn to see a person, I immediately think I'm a victim. It's an animal state. It's like we've regressed because we're not frightened of animals anymore. There used to be wolves and big cats in the place where I used to live and that's what the pioneers had to contend with. Now it's not animals. It's ferocious human beings. It's the psychopath and the maniac who might be coming to claim you - someone who wants to mug you, steal your bicycle, steal your self-respect by raping you. ."

Scared. The last time I talked to Natalie Merchant, there were flutters too. It was in a field in the middle of Apeldoorn, Holland. Midnight. We were talking and, honestly, looking at the stars. Suddenly we heard a rustle and something was moving towards us. For a moment, it might have been one of those psychopaths she was just talking about. As it rustled nearer, we realized it was a horse, a big brown horse. We patted its head and fed it some gross. Life is like that sometimes.

10,000 Maniacs, to hasten to the point, have just released In My Tribe, already described in these excited pages as the year's most perfect record, by less lightminded minds than mine. Twelve new songs rattling with fever, wish-fulfillment and words that manage to sound, for once, like liberating things. Sweet secretions of the imagination, quick and alive, waterlogged with fleeting sensations that involve you and melt past you, songs that negotiate new ways to say, "Suck me until I sting."

To call it ravished would involve an unhappy dilution of the meaning of that fine word. It's not like Fairport Convention, R.E.M., Talking Heads, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cat Stevens or Love Tractor. That clears the heady stench of lazy media lies out of the cupboard. Now we can start. There are 12 impetuous songs on In My Tribe, all wholly desirable, songs that manage to establish some middle ground between gusts and goose pimples, edge and elegance, surrender and vague ecstasy. The 13th song is a respectable cover of Cat Stevens' Peace Train, which contains the occasional liquid click, but hums like an outsider. This is a slight foil by the way. Natalie laughs at it now. That's good enough.

In My Tribe, don't let me get too perturbed, is not Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Robert Johnson's King Of The Delta Blues Singers, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, Bolan's Electric Warrior, Jackson Browne's Late For The Sky, The Buzzcocks Another Music In A Different Kitchen, Sly Stone's Life or Little Richard's first two albums. It swarms outside the Holy Eight or Nine. I wanted to tell you that. It is short of that kind of earthquake and that doesn't make it anything less than necessary. What am I saying?

In My Tribe is a luminous distraction in the some way as Dexy's Too-Rye-Aye, Rickie Lee Jone's first album, The Fall's Grotesque, The Waterboys A Pagan Place, The Go-Betweens Tallulah, The Smith's The Queen Is Dead, John Cale's Music For A Now Society, Tom Waits Swordfishtrombone or The Heart of Saturday Night, Hank Williams I'm So Lonesome I Can Cry, The Byrds Turn! Turn! Turn!, The Faces Ooh La La, Tim Hardin's II. It doesn't feel better or less than those records. Tonight, it feels just as good.

Eighteen months ago, the second 10,000 Maniacs Lp, The Wishing Chair, would have slipped in among those fragments (I deliberately left out Television and Patti Smith to show you how cramping lists can be). With fey, self-possessed peaks like Lilydale, Back O' The Moon, Among The Americans and Cotton Alley, it appeared the same month in 1985 as Dexy's Don't Stand Me Down and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, forming a triumvirate of obsessive pop LPs. In the light of In My Tribe, that previous Maniacs collection hints at something a little too diffident and hesitant. Angelic maybe. Not a bad thing. Unworldly. That's the word.

In My Tribe suggests that this is a pop group growing up in ways that most modern pop would not possess the imagination to do. This marks an ascent that has nothing to do with the so-called 'maturity' that we accept as an equation for 'loss of life' in pop these days. Where The Wishing Chair wafted, In My Tribe tumults. Where the former was keen to guess at its own state of mind, too versatile for its own good, this new record maneuvers with more class and cunning. Is it old-fashioned to say that In My Tribe moves me.... dramatically? It is the record of a group fully realizing itself.

"In some ways it puts The Wishing Chair in the shade," smiles Natalie Merchant. "I hope we can do another one which does the some. A few people have been disappointed that there hasn't been as many folk songs - no accordion and just one mandolin song. I still think that influence is there though. American country music and British folk music."

Between these two records, the Maniacs shed one group member, John Lombardo, a king of a man as I remember, forcing them into sudden changes. Lombardo's six and 12-strinq guitars and occasional bass had formerly deviated through their panicky pop, acting as anchor and knuckle-duster at whim. Last summer I witnessed the first Maniacs show without him, at a sweaty, expectant New York Ritz, convinced by the new songs, but missing his constraint and off-chance innovations. As a fan, let's not pretend otherwise, I was left, not exactly troubled, but certainly speculative. Nothing prepared me for In My Tribe.

"John's leaving inevitably changed the sound and the actual song-writing." (He was the main writer.) "He left out of frustration basically. We'd been together six years, remember.

"I think it's easier for people to identify with the group now because it's much more personal and a lot of the things we've written about have, I think, happened to other people. On the previous album, My Mother the War was more abstract, the way it assessed women's roles in war and wondered about the role of the female figure. Grey Victory was about nuclear destruction, much more impersonal than anything on this new record.

"We're probably more complex these days, but it's more of a directed complexity. It used in confusion, or something."

Your words tend to jolt and jar, not like "normal" pop lyrics ...

"To me, they make complete and perfect rhythmic sense. I might have a strange sense of rhythm, texture and tone. It's completely natural to me. You watch people dance and sometimes they're undulating as though they are about to fall, but that's natural for them. That's their natural rhythm. I don't make an attempt to phrase words in an unusual way. I just listen to it and sing what's in my mind.

"A project I've always wanted to do is to send cassettes of a song, stripped down to the chords, without melody, to 12 different singers and have them re-record it with their own vocals. It would all come back completely different but they'd all harmonize cos they'd all be in the same key at least. It's like those drawing tests of children - draw a house, draw yourself, draw your parents. Then they interpret them. If the lines are too rigid, they decide it's an abused child or an uptight child.

"As for my own writing and singing, I thought I did those things in a very straightforward fashion until people started asking (laughs), 'What language is this?' I guess I realized I had to get more direct and less abstract. These are the most obvious lyrics I have ever written. It's all written in prose style, almost complete sentences. Unless I'm in a rush or particularly nervous, that's the way I think, the way I speak to myself."

You're a peculiarly literate pop group.

"In 10,000 Maniacs, there's always been an emphasis on the test as well as the music. Mystery? I don't know. I feel I'd be happy to put out another album that made absolutely no sense to anyone but me. This time, I had so many things that I had seen and wanted to share. I hate to use the word 'share' but that's pretty much what it is."

This is a record steeped in longing for all kinds of things. Not wistful though, hell no. Not even daydreaming in ways that you might expect from five small-town Americans gazing out at the world and hoping for some sense. Longing for something to end (What's the Matter Here?); longing for the day to erupt into something better (Like the Weather); longing for some truth (Don't Talk); longing, of course, for peace (Peace Train); longing for war to stop its foolishness and stop taking out lives (Gun Shy); longing even for heaven on Earth (City of Angels). Leaning and thirsting.

"There use to be this attitude towards my writing that I was somehow longing for the past. The girl with the dusty books and grandma's dress, sitting in the rocking-chair longing for something that has passed already. I'm not that nostalgic. I collect old things, that's as far as it really goes. I collect anything useless and old to the point where I can't move in my house anymore. I used to gather it all together and take it to shows, throw it all at the audience. I haven't done it for a while. These days, my obsession lies mostly with old photographs."

People still think of you as an odd group, a motley crew, a bunch of harmless American eccentrics.

"I think we're pretty odd. Part of that does come from the isolation of growing up in Jamestown. It's a small-town oddness."

Your a big observer, an insatiable observer.

"I look at people's faces. I think people get the face they deserve basically. By the time they're 50, the lines are pointing towards the kind of lives they've had."

Like when your mum tells you, 'Don't pull that face, it'll stick!' Completely true! Are you observing to the point that you can't lose yourself in experience?

"No, that's a problem, isn't it? It's a kind of curse because I'm always recording what I'm seeing. I always have to be writing it down. I can't just be there and watch it all. The distance of the observer? Yeah, that's always the main problem. When I observe things though, I react strongly, emotionally. I'm not completely separate from the things I see. Like I can never give myself completely to love, never have been able to. Besides, I don't know if I want to know someone that closely."

In My Tribe, your version of the world at this point? Your way of emptying yourself?

"I try to be really thorough. You have three minutes to tell people and I often feel I haven't said enough. I'm more confident and proud of this record though. It still moves me in ways that I find, well amazing."

Me too.

I join the other four Maniacs in another hotel room. The neatly dimpled Robert '1,000 Ties' Buck, the gallant, gentlemanly type, the sort of guy you'd trust with your first edition copy of "Gravity's Rainbow" (guitars, mandolin, pedal steel). Wacky Dennis Drew, a man who will suddenly turn to you, as you're driving through the Hudson Tunnel and wonder aloud whether there are more tiles in the tunnel than there are people in New York; very dry (keyboards). Jerome 'Jerry' Augustyniak, my own favorite Maniac, whose lavish curly locks always turn the filly's heads; shy and brilliant (drums, percussion). 'Handsome' Steven Gustafson, the pin-up boy of the group, temperamental but almost indecently cool. As I have said, an eccentric bunch, a rather peculiar array of people.

"Well, we've been called worse," deadpans Dennis. "I guess we play like we live... sloppily. Just like I live.. making a mistake at every bar!"

"In America, they don't call us eccentrics," says Robert. "They call us jerks!" We're the sort of guys that people threaten to beat up in bars."

"If you were from America," laughs Gustafson, "wouldn't you threaten to beat Robert up?"

Before 10,000 Maniacs came The Obsessions ("hard-core pop") and Still Life ("more hard-core pop"). Natalie was one day invited down to the loft where the "fellas" rehearsed, expecting a party, ending up singing. She almost didn't return, saying, "No way am I going to do this again. My mom tells me you guys are evil!" She remained to add the trigger-happy vocals to 1983's Human Conflict Number Five EP on their own Christian Burial label. That was eventually followed by their debut LP, Secrets of the I Ching, a scattering of ideas with a small handful of good moments, particularly the closing track and single, My Mother the War, which was eventually pounced on by John Peel in this country and played consistently.

Somewhere along the line, they hooked up with manager and honorary sixth member, the enigmatic Peter Leak, who brought them to London for their first shows at the end of 1984. Scrappy, slovenly, chaotic performances that prompted this writer to report that this goofy bunch of hicks were, 'escalating to a furious pitch of excitement.' For the first time in my life, I guessed right. Beneath the surface, this group suggest huge trumpet blasts. They also wore the worst shoes in the world.

"One of the reasons we've always tended to play straight ahead is we've always been big fans of songs," explains Robert. "Since my childhood, I've always loved a great song. I was brought up in a country 'n' western household and I think that comes across in my playing. My grandmother was a gospel songwriter. She would write songs in the middle of the night, wake me up, and play the melodies to me. As a group, we've been influenced by a lot of American folk music ... country 'n' western, bluegrass, even Appalachian music. It's all very simple and straightforward in its approach, but with very emotional lyrics."

I ask him to describe the new record.

"Crystalline."

I ask Jerry Augustyniak the same question. He thought it was a difficult one.

"Powerful. Dramatically more continual, both emotionally and musically. A lot more seamless than The Wishing Chair."

Anything else come to mind?

"Erm... I just had this dream last night where I was driving fast in an automobile down the highway and Guitar Man by David Gates and Bread came on the radio. Erm ... I don't know if it has anything to do with this album though." "I think," quips 'Crazy' Dennis Drew, "that it might say something about the next album." Robert Buck tells me In My Tribe reminds him of Paul Simon's Graceland, in its crisp delivery, the habit of each and every song in insinuating and achieving a consummate, streamlined, marble finish. Perhaps the way you keep flipping it over and hearing it again and again. Insatiable.

It's better, I tell him. Don't worry about that. It will doubtlessly sell a fraction of Simon's surprisingly flirtatious work, but In My Tribe is, if you like, the moral winner. Furthermore, it towers above most pop music this year, an increasingly addictive sprawl of sweetness and darkness. You don't want to know how many times this writer has heard it this week. If Peace Train doesn't nibble at the chart, there's better, bigger possibilities to ensure this music doesn't disappear into a star-shaped hole with 'oblivion' scratched on its shutter - Hey Jack Kerouac, Cherry Tree or What's The Matter Here? sounded like they are particularly and firmly destined for happy ends.

"It's a great falling feeling," sighs Robert. "Sometimes it does feel like a magical process. I think this record went as for as it could. When it was done, I felt complete about the whole record."

Dennis?

"I remember producer Joe Boyd telling us that, on the first album the band could sometimes sound like one instrument. We definitely achieved that all the way through this one. All of us moving as one, like a big ocean, a great wall of sound. The sheer clarity of the record is enough to overawe, overwhelm.'

Wasn't William Burroughs who said, 'a psychotic is a guy who's just discovered what's going on'? With that dictum in mind, what do you say about 10,000 Maniacs?

What do you say when you've exhausted your quote of sly adjectives for the afternoon?

Splash wildly. Silvery. Ravishingly mellow, like Charlotte Rampling's voice, Ian McCulloch's wig, Bill Brandt's portrait of Malcolm Muggeridge, Jack Kennedy's bow-tie, Samuel Becket's scarf and Elvis Presley's groin.

10,000 Maniacs are no great tangle, respecting the speculation that says pop always comes back to a the shiver and the spell. Or the scalding and the scream. Have it your own way.