*** JOHN HIATT “Stolen Moments” <i> A&M;</i> :<i> Albums are rated from five stars (a classic) to one star (poor).</i> :<i> Albums are rated from five stars (a classic) to one star (poor). </i>

As a songwriter, the rock critics’ and fellow-singers’ composer of choice hits a few potholes this time around--his paeans to domesticity are trite (if intense), and the big ballad is mere made-to-order craftsmanship that must have Bonnie Raitt drooling.

But the music is another story: Far more raucous, impulsive and adventurous than Hiatt’s last album “Slow Turning,” this is a rootsy, folk-rockin’ sound in which Hiatt tosses off emotionally and technically complex lines as if they were occurring to him on the spot. In “Seven Little Indians,” the instruments fall casually into place to form a taut, meditative backdrop that seems always about to unravel, but never quite does--an appropriate setting for a tale of fragile heritage lost and regained.

Elsewhere, twangy guitars and crashing beats evoke the giddiness of his celebrations of love and wife and kids. Hiatt has an innately screwball quality that gives even this mawkish material an off-center appeal. But he’s at his best when he has some irony in his diet, or a demon or two to swat at: repressed emotions that eat you up (“Back of My Mind”), the ecstasy of their release (“Thirty Years if Tears”).

If we sometimes feel that we’re sitting in on a self-help testimonial, Hiatt periodically bugs his eyes and flaps his arms, rocking madly through a Newmanesque portrait of an incorrigible rockabilly cat, or, most intriguingly, levitating into the cosmic plane of “Listening to Old Voices,” a haunting, primordial emanation in which he conjures spirits with a reverence that could bring tears to your eyes.