Contented Hiatt on Family, Forgiveness : CHECK LIST****<i> Great Balls of Fire</i> ***<i> Good Vibrations</i> **<i> Maybe Baby</i> *<i> Running on Empty </i>

*** 1/2 JOHN HIATT. “Slow Turning.” A&M.;

John Hiatt’s ninth sounds like an album that could’ve come out in the ‘70s; its nice ‘n’ rural-like instrumental support (from Hiatt’s touring band plus picker Bernie Leadon) is built that unobtrusively around the songwriter’s acoustic guitar and soulful pipes. But “Slow Turning” feels like it could only have been released in the late ‘80s: Its contented sense of family and forgiveness would’ve been unfathomable in a serious rock context a decade or more ago.

Always a latent moralist of staggeringly cynical proportions, Ex-Angry Guy Hiatt has cheerfully become a blatant moralist of staggeringly hopeful proportions. As on last year’s “Bring the Family,” there’s a joyful sense of true love and community found at the last possible moment; unlike that album, the band here is invisible enough to leave Hiatt’s unsentimental romanticism nearly naked.

His warmth is tempered as always with the wry (“Georgia Rae,” a rockin’ paean to his baby daughter, includes an account of her conception); the wrenching (“Icy Blue Heart” details the most reticent, shell-shocked seduction imaginable); and the wicked (“Paper Thin,” an alcoholic lament that’s the Stones-iest cut via the hand of vet producer Glyn Johns).

Even in the many love songs, Hiatt’s domestic bliss is hardly Pollyanna-ish: “Time is short and here’s the damn thing about it / You’re gonna die, gonna die for sure / And you can learn to live with love or without it,” he sings in the title cut, a celebration of life’s inevitabilities and how, against all odds, life can sometimes inevitably get better . Just like certain invaluable singer/songwriters.