As I stroll into the Warner Bros. office to interview 10,000 Maniacs, Robert Buck is rubbing Natalie Merchant's feet on the sofa.

It's a surprising introduction to one so polite. And Robert Buck, the Maniacs' guitarist, is very polite. In fact, he's so polite that when he's explaining how the group is having problems with UK airplay due to the uncomfortable proximity of their name to the tag attached by some of our seamier tabloids to the Hungerford killer ("The Maniac") he involuntarily refers to him as "that gentleman who..."

And next to the grimy Andrew Eldritch, who is ambling aimlessly around the same office, both Robert and Natalie look far too polite to be in a rock 'n' rolI band.

But what the hell? They're necessary.

For politeness and necessity, the feet in question are put back on the floor and pad, together with mine and Robert's, to a quieter cell in which we discuss the re-emergence of 10,000 Maniacs and their new LP, In My Tribe.

You may recall 10,000 Maniacs as the group of oddballs from Jamestown, upstate New York who released two self-financed records - one song from which, My Mother The War, was pounced on by John Peel and helped establish the group's name in the UK and followed up with a debut album, The Wishing Chair, for Elektra in 1985.

They were also carelessly assumed to belong to the ridiculously loose wave of American guitar bands who were pegging down their groundsheets over here at the time.

This 'wave', in hindsight, seems rather odd, but as Natalie puts it, it was a "strange time".

Hardly a bar band - at that time they were drawing on influences as diverse as traditional English folk, reggae and the Gang Of Four - 10,000 Maniacs never really fitted. And shortly after that promising LP, anyone might have been forgiven had they assumed that 10,000 Maniacs had pensioned themselves off to their Jamestown bathchairs for good.

But, as In My Tribe asserts, they didn't. Instead, they toured for a long time, lost a member in multi-instrumentalist John Lombardo, and wrote a new album as a five-piece. This became In My Tribe, which is a magnificent album.

It has almost completely done away with the overt bouts of eclecticism which cratered their earlier material and sounds fully confident of its own identity, laying itself before the listener as a luxuriant carpet of guitar-spangled pop with a buoyant subtle folk underlay. It is candid and candescent and in its reflective nature has more in common with some of its US contemporaries like REM than the group ever did when they were bracketed thus.

Even more noticeable is a new clarity in both Natalie's vocals and lyrics. The pure aural joy she takes in words is still there, but meanings don't need to be disentangled from the swirls of "pure vowels and consonants" she was so enamoured of when we first met two years ago.

"That was a goal," she admits, "to simplify, to make myself more easily understood."

It seems to have worked. I tell her I could run through nearly every track on In My Tribe and tell her...

"What it's about," she intercepts, laughing. "Like, right, a textbook, a table of contents of really grim subjects... but they're things I think about nearly all the time. I don't want to make out as if my purpose is to bleed for the world. But I see it, I read about it in the papers, see it when we travel.

"They're difficult things for me to ignore. So I decided that rather than change over and start writing pop lyrics. . ."

You weren't tempted, surely?

"I was, um, not too tempted! But It's been suggested ever since we started: Why do you have to write these complex and upsetting things, that's not what pop music is about. But I'd never really considered my lyrics pop lyrics. They're more discussions about the things I'm really obsessed with. . ."

Part of this obviously corporate concern over the Maniacs' debatable level of "pop" content has been allayed by the inclusion on In My Tribe of a cover of Cat Stevens' Peace Train - apparently his biggest US hit, though never a contender over here - which has, they tell me, as a single at least served to convince the great American public that 10,000 Maniacs are "not a hardcore band".

The song itself is not such an odd choice. Its naivety jars a little with Natalie's glittering prose but it displays a yearning and a concern, both qualities which are always foremost in Maniacs songs.

To be quick, and blunt: In My Tribe scans the worlds of child abuse, the strangled dreams of the beats, the weather, alcoholism, the ambiguous 'strength' imbued by a military training, marriage, the deceptive promise and the devastating reality of Los Angeles, the lie of the landowner's possession...

It doesn't scan any of these bluntly or quickly. To me there seem to be two key tracks, the first being City Of Angels.

"Well," says Natalie, "it is about Los Angeles. I really wanted to write a song about it, because I'm from a small town. But I actually waited until we were recording there, because it's a really overwhelming urban monster - it's beyond belief to fly in over LA, it just seems endless...

"So when we were there, I was out walking - which is an unusual thing in LA - and I would walk to the studio, which is a 45 minute walk, and I saw this man sobbing in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of a bank. And he didn't look like a homeless person, just a crushed person, really distraught... it just made me really resolved to write the song..."

Is it always the crushed people you notice on the street?

Robert: "I think that when you see someone who's extremely happy, you're suspicious. At least, in America. I'm very suspicious of anyone who seems overly happy and joyful ... "

"You have to question how often they're in that state," laughs Natalie. "Because if someone's in this constant state of bliss, then they're either very much at peace with themselves. . ."

"Or they're insane," grins Robert.

"In places like New York City," Natalie continues, "it's very uncommon to see people smile or laugh. And as soon as you make eye contact with someone it pierces right through you... and if it's someone who's insane, then immediately you're a victim. They come at you, and they either wanna talk, or get money, or...

"It's a strange world, and I think we have lost touch with... um, especially in America, the television culture. I notice this sometimes when we're playing live too, there's not always an interaction, sometimes people seem to be watching us as if we're on television..."

This idea of losing touch with whatever foundation it is that Natalie can't quite pin down is the axis around which the second key track, A Campfire Song, spins. A duet with Michael Stipe, it paints a poignant vignette of a landowner and diamond-miner, clutching his wealth avariciously while still sensing "something is out of reach". . .

Two years ago the freshly-signed Maniacs were enthralled at the prospect of all the free travel. Two years later and not only has it broadened their minds, it's strengthened their resolve.

"As long as there are things for me to explore," says Natalie, "I'm happy. But I guess I'm really bewildered when we travel around and I see pollution, rivers dying, endless industrial parks, cities, people who look like they're living in really unhappy conditions, whose lives seem, um, really empty. I don't know, maybe they're not," she concedes, "but that's the way it looks."

Robert: "I used to work in a factory and there were older gentlemen there who'd worked there all their lives, and seemed to really enjoy it, being married, having a family, living in the same small town....

"But once I got to know them well enough to ask, 'Well, what if things would've been different?' they just told me, 'Shut up. Don't ever talk to me about that.'"

If anything, this points out - just in case you were wondering - that 10,000 Maniacs music is about the sheer thrill of life as much as anything else. It merely yearns for something the modern age has left behind.

But they're aware that elsewhere, the dismay they feel at the potentially disastrous cloud America labors under is being translated into much more nightmarish visions by people like David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet, Natalie says, "traumatized her".

Robert, who has some background in a "mystic Eastern religion", harbors an idealistic notion that, sooner or later, the human race will recognize its follies and turn back, despite the fact that he "enjoys technology", and both he and Natalie speak with some admiration of the Amish people, a sect who are in close proximity to their Jamestown home and who have carried on the same traditional, pioneer ways of life for nigh on 200 years of horse-drawn ploughing and gas-lit evenings.

"But", points out Robert, "even though there is a certain beauty to their lifestyle, there are certain things that, um... they pay the price in a way. You have to be very controlled about everything you do to live that simply..."

Well, I doubt if many of them get to hammer away on electric guitars... in their own ideal world, would 10,000 Maniacs exist?

"Well it would be quieter, wouldn't it?" laughs Natalie. "Oh I guess we would exist. But no one would know about us..."

10,000 Maniacs are currently one of America's best groups and, in a quiet way, one her most important too.