POP MUSIC REVIEW : Knocking on Heaven’s Door With Merchant & Maniacs

Proving once again Friday night at the Universal Amphitheatre why she’s one of the most transfixing performers in rock, Natalie Merchant--the woman who gave twirling dervishes a good name again post-Nicks--sang and skipped with such elegant, Edenic grace that it seemed she might know of which she spoke in titling 10,000 Maniacs’ latest album “Our Time in Eden.”

The knockout band, too, cultivated its usual garden of flawless folk-meets-rock-’n’-roll earthly delight, well on the preternatural side of postmodern.

Now that the group’s slightly more commercial, Peter Asher-produced years are past, Merchant has gone back to being less concerned about the articulation of her lyrics, which--ironically--are among the most assuredly literate short stories in pop.

It’s a sweet irony, though, when the music achieves this much unspoken emotion through her solipsistic passion and the players’ extreme precision. And Merchant’s a mistress of effortless body language: Caressing her belly during “Eat for Two,” she made pregnancy seem like absolutely the sexiest thing going.

Modulating her animation, Merchant has a way of breaking out of her stillness and suddenly galloping across a stage in a way that adds an extra measure of rapture to an exciting musical coda like the one on “Few and Far Between.” That climactic number, along with “Hey Jack Kerouac” and “Candy Everybody Wants,” made additional peppy use of a horn section, turning dirges into celebrations left and right.

“Is this heaven?” Merchant wondered ironically, singing about L.A.’s homeless in “City of Angels”; double-ironically, the answer seemed, momentarily, yes.