Clinic

It doesn't matter what Clinic's lead mumbler, Ade Blackburn, is saying on "Second Line," the first single from the U.K. group's debut album, Internal Wrangler. The song, featuring warped guitars, minimalist funk beats, and Blackburn's nonsensical phrasing of "diggy diggy phenomena," transcends its shady delivery simply because of the inclusion of one of the catchiest melodies in ages. Over the course of the record, it becomes clear that a quartet of anonymous oddballs deconstructing slow jams could be hailed as the next big imported thing.

Details

Sunday, Oct. 7, at 9 p.m.

Stratford 4 and Touched by a Janitor open

Tickets are $10

621-4455

Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St. (at Missouri), S.F.

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• Ade Blackburn
• Radiohead

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Since forming four years ago, Clinic has released numerous singles and the Internal Wrangler LP -- debuting overseas last year, and now available on these shores -- as well as touring Europe with Radiohead. Unlike Radiohead's bombastic opuses, however, Clinic's songs are minute, conversational numbers that rarely stretch past 2 1/2 minutes. Combining awkward pop brilliance, sticky dance beats, and an overriding cotton-candy haze, the brief tunes succeed in making you starved for more.

Perhaps the secret to Clinic's success is the ease with which the band reconstructs the musical past -- reverse-engineering pop numbers down to their building blocks before starting over. Songs like "T.K." and "2/4" weave dub melodica, hip hop drumming, garage pop, and art rock squalor into a lo-fi deep-fry that works because of -- not in spite of -- its roughness.

As for Blackburn's vocal "style," the marble-mouthed Brit would come off pubescent and whiny if his preoccupations didn't seem so mature. On "Distortions," he sings, "I want to know my body/ I want this out not in me" as if he were excising a cancer or fetus; other tunes hint at violence, death, and horror. Even when his wordplay gets less obscure, Blackburn likes to keep listeners in the shadows. On the twangy "Evil Bill," Blackburn wrastles with some inner demon, but it's never exactly clear what's driving him to the dark side.

While Blackburn cloaks himself in mystery, he often wears surgical scrubs during shows and photo shoots, suggesting an obsession with biological themes. Perhaps the group is attempting to dissect the corpse of rock and piece it back together in some new shape. Far from being bogged down in scientific experimentation, however, Internal Wrangler shows that Clinic is more invested in the state of the soul than in cosmetic reconstruction.