POP STARS ***** Great Balls of Fire **** Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door *** Good Vibrations ** Maybe Baby * Ain’t That a Shame

10,000 MANIACS “Blind Man’s Zoo.” Elektra ****

The soothing, distinctly unmaniacal single “Trouble Me” is a real salve for damaged ears and emotions, as Natalie Merchant sweetly coos, “Trouble me, disturb me with all your cares and your worries . . . Why let your shoulders bend underneath this burden when my back is sturdy and strong?”

It’s a wonderful invitation to gentle, unburdened intimacy--and a misleading

one. For Merchant spends the rest of 10,000 Maniacs’ third album troubling us with a litany of societal evils. And her lilting voice is such a captivating instrument--and the pop setting so deceptively pretty, yet structurally unusual--that even the socially unconscious may be a captive audience for her horror stories.

The album begins bittersweetly with an accidental pregnancy (the bouncy “Eat for Two”) and ends in an inferno with a demented church janitor torching an interracial nightclub (the string-laden “Jubilee”). In between these short stories come big issues: covert “freedom-fighter” missions, Vietnam, the American slave trade, the environment. Set in prose form on the lyric sheet, the almost impossibly unwieldy verses read as fine as they sound.

Warning to hepsters: This is a pop album, elegantly produced by Peter Asher, who has carefully loosed the “alternative” shackle and made the group suitable for VH-1, to much elitist consternation.

Easy listening it’s not; the content is as harsh as the style is non-abrasive. A spoonful of Merchant’s tender voice makes her bitter, medicinal words go down quite beautifully, till we’re ready to let her trouble us all the more.