10,000 Maniacs reached full artistic maturity on Our Time in Eden, the band’s final studio album with founding vocalist and songwriter Natalie Merchant. Every musical seed planted through the band’s catalog comes into full bloom here, whether it’s the theatrical balladry of “Jezebel” and “How You’ve Grown” or the band’s once-timid flirtation with Motown grooves blossoming into unapologetic tributes to Holland-Dozier-Holland on career highlights “Candy Everybody Wants” and “Few and Far Between.” The melodramatic uptempo number “Stockton Gala Days” splits the difference between these two extremes and may be the band’s all-time best song, with Merchant singing from the perspective of an older woman who has spent her entire life as a people pleaser while repressing her own desires. The album may be the end of the line for the classic version of 10,000 Maniacs, but much of the record conveys a yearning romanticism and sense of unlimited possibility that feels more like the beginning of a story. “These Are Days,” which would go on to become the band’s signature hit, is particularly wistful and sentimental as Merchant advises the listener to live in the moment before they become nostalgic for it later on. The sound is bright and joyful but has subtle traces of melancholy, hinting that this wisdom is coming from someone who may feel life has already passed them by. The sound of Our Time in Eden is just as staid and tasteful as the two 10,000 Maniacs albums that came before it, but the style suited the simple elegance of their songwriting. The presentation is unfussy and direct, and even the most ornate arrangements on the record have a dry, no-frills clarity. By this stage of their career the band had crossed over to an older adult contemporary audience, but unlike a lot of artists they sounded more fully themselves when they embraced adulthood and maturity than they had during their more chaotic youth.