Recommended Dosage : Morphine--a guitarless trio from Boston--is pleasing the college crowd with its bizarre brand of ‘low rock.’

If the Boston trio Morphine has a secret game plan, it’s got to be “Lay low and avoid the high notes.” The guitarless group, with instrumentation from saxophone, two-string bass and drums, basks in baritone. Imperfect rock melodies and smoky blues grooves rarely rise to a pitch higher than a foghorn.

Such an approach might suggest something as numbing as Novocain, but Morphine’s sound proves hypnotic and darkly seductive.

“Our music is narcotic,” says singer and bassist Mark Sandman, speaking in a low, laid-back voice. “It’s thick and almost lubricious.”

About the only thing Morphine seems to do fast is make albums. The trio, rounded out by saxophonist Dana Colley and drummer Billy Conway, recorded their new album, “Cure for Pain,” in 12 days and released it less than a year after its acclaimed debut “Good.”

Since its release last fall, “Cure” has crept in slow and steady fashion to No. 18 on the College Music Journal’s alternative airplay chart.

“Our success has been a gradual thing through word of mouth,” says Sandman, “which seems more natural than something that’s been pushed.”

Sandman, who’s in his 30s, grew up in Cambridge, Mass., where his mother was a social worker and his father ran a small electronics business. His early exposure to music included his mother’s recorder orchestra. As a teen-ager, he became a Jimi Hendrix and AC/DC fan, then discovered such blues and jazz artists as Jimmy Smith, Oliver Nelson and Mose Allison. Later, he became mesmerized by the offbeat and experimental music of Prince.

In his late teens, Sandman began playing music and took his guitar on a two-year road trip. He traveled from Brazil to Alaska, where he worked on a commercial fishing boat, then returned to Cambridge to join his first real band, Treat Her Right.

Morphine started four years ago when Sandman began experimenting with Colley and original drummer Jerome Dupree. They all knew one another from Boston’s tight music scene, where they had played in various, makeshift bands in styles from psychedelic funk to jazz. Current drummer Conway also came from the city’s pool of bands.

It was obscure artists such as Lonnie Pitchford, who played a one-string guitar, who inspired Sandman (who writes all the lyrics and plays a dominant role in writing the music) to pull the “extra” strings off his bass.

“I was also inspired by an old 45 called ‘Cherokee Dance’ that had this guy playing something called a unitar,” he says. “It was a bass string being played with a slide. It was so new and great, and it had never crossed my mind before to do that.”

The lyrics on “Cure for Pain” are often down and out and hopelessly romantic, touching on themes from jealousy to love addiction to loss. But Sandman doesn’t like to associate his own life with the lyrics.

“My songs are not necessarily about something that’s happened to me. It could be a friend,” he says. He pauses, then modifies his position. “The more you try to disguise your real feelings, the more they come out. Sometimes I don’t realize it till six months after the record is out. It’s like, ‘Wow, that is really how I felt?’ ”

Sandman says the trio doesn’t really know where their bizarre sound fits into the scheme of rock today, and they would like to keep it that way. “We call it low rock. If you have to provide a category, that’s the one we can live with. You can just say that in the record store, Morphine can be found between Madonna and Motorhead.”