Rate: 3 1/2 star (out of 5)

Natalie merchant is an American original with a corduroy voice and an exalted sense of the everyday, a singer who can conjure rare atmospheres and get on people's nerves at the same time, all without finishing her phrases. Ophelia, Merchant's follow-up to 1995's Tigerlily, replaces the skintight band of that solo breakthrough with a shifting cast of players, reaching out to include brass and strings. Yet like the debut, Ophelia devotes itself to one quality above all else: the unstructured luxury of Merchant's sound.

That sound is the deliberate, depressed aural landscape -- underlaid with acute singer/songwriter rhythms -- of the same woman who, with 10,000 Maniacs in the Eighties, found nothing funny about glitz. On the title song, Merchant majestically shuffles her self-invented deck of female face cards; her singing continually slides toward lakes of unhappiness or dares to swim out of them. She fights: "Life Is Sweet," Merchant insists on one frightening little tune. She praises: "For your kindness/I'm in debt to you," she allows with added cheer and tempo on "Kind and Generous," the current single.

Over the years, Merchant has moved from the coffee shop to the Body Shop. As befits a socially committed superstar, on Ophelia she and guest guitarist Daniel Lanois get windy about the shortcomings of our ironic age ("Thick as Thieves"), and she climaxes with a stout hymn ("When They Ring Them Golden Bells"). But a four-song stretch in the middle of her album soars. It starts with the mazelike "Frozen Charlotte," Merchant's floating lines narrating a persistent dream of hungover desire. This bleeds into the piano-driven "My Skin," on which delicate complaints metastasize into gorgeous demands, before Merchant sings the light-filled "Break Your Heart," wherein she and a muted trumpet stare down the non-stop gloom. Then, everything crests on "King of May," an extraordinary elegy for an ordinary person. "Make a cardboard crown for him," she instructs. "Make a hole in the sky for him." She glides on a kaleidoscopic melody light-years beyond her words. This is Natalie Merchant in all her pestering glory. (RS 788)

JAMES HUNTER