God forbid you should ever find yourself the subject of a Candyskins song. It's not that the Oxford, England-based band writes bad songs. On the contrary, they're among the catchier post-Britpop tracks around today. The catch is, if bandleader Nick Cope is singing about you, chances are you may well have died a horribly sad death -- and the Candyskins will have people dancing about it.

Take "Feed It," the lead single from the group's fourth album, Death of a Minor TV Celebrity. The guitars crunch like T-Rex and swirl like "Magical Mystery Tour." Cope sings loop-de-loops around that lout in Oasis, especially when he delivers the maddeningly infectious, instantly memorable chorus that all but demands a press of the repeat button on your disc player. But the song's all about those poor, comet-chasing coots in the Heaven's Gate death cult. Oh, and then there's that sad Larry Walters bloke who inspired the title track. Sixteen years ago, he achieved fame for tying forty-odd weather balloons to a lawn chair and soaring into LAX airspace. He got to be on chat shows, but when he became yesterday's news he shot himself in the heart. "It's a cheery little story," deadpans Cope in a trans-Atlantic phone call. "But it just sounded like a good idea for a song." Ditto the Heaven's Gate gang, for whom Cope expresses what could almost pass for envy. "It is really sad, but they were very comfortable -- they were going to this wonderful world out in space somewhere. They were happy to leave, which to me is not a bad way to go, really."

Cope's is a skewered, twisted kind of dark optimism that perfectly sums up his band's prospects with Death of a Minor TV Celebrity, which seems a bit like the last runner in a marathon crossing the finish line a day after all the crowds and camera crews have moved on. For about fifteen minutes in the mid-Nineties, that tiresome old threat of a second British music invasion seemed perilously close to reality. Then the egg-timer went off, Oasis sulked back home and Blur tried to pretend they never had anything to do with the genre by going lo-fi. Across the pond today, Brit-pop is maligned like disco circa 1981 -- yesterday's news, mate. Fancy a bit of UNKLE?

Needless to say, it's a hell of a time to come out with an infectiously melodic album that has "Beatlesque" written all over it. Nevertheless, it's hard not to root for the Candyskins -- Cope, his guitarist brother Mark, drummer John Halliday, lead guitarist Nick Burton and newcomer bassist Brett Gordon. That's partly because the songs -- particularly "Feed It" and "Somewhere Under London" -- are top notch, but also because the group retains an underdog status that's a welcome change from the "We're bigger n' God back home, ya Yankee scum" 'tude exemplified by the Gallagher Bros. Unlike most other Nineties Brit bands, the Candyskins concentrated their earliest efforts in the States, returning to slowly win over their homeland only after Geffen Records dumped them two and a half albums into a three-album contract.

"It was torture, because we had to sit through eighteen months of not being able to record or tour or anything," explains Cope about the legal web that sidelined them after their Geffen exit in 1994. "I don't know if we were better off or worse off than other bands, but we were halfway through [the third album] when they came to the studio and said, 'Okay, put your instruments down, you're off the label.'"

So despite having two major label albums under their belt when they returned to England in 1994, the Candyskins for all intents and purposes were a fledgling indie band fighting to be heard amidst the island-wide roar of innumerable indie bands all raising a catchy racket. They'd have to wait until 1997 for their English breakthrough, "Monday Morning" from their third album, Sunday Morning Fever. With Death of a Minor TV Celebrity they hope to continue that momentum -- and try for a second time to win over America with the enthusiasm of newcomers rather than the jaded spirits of grizzled veterans.

"That's the sad thing really, because you feel like you know too much," says Cope. "When you're a beginner, you just get free drinks and stuff ... which we're still very pleased to get. Now, we're not asking for huge amounts of money, but after all the s--- we've been through before -- writing songs and not having them see the light of day -- we just want people to be able to hear the record."

RICHARD SKANSE