Catherine Wheel frontman Rob Dickinson isn't fond of dropping cliches, but if he were, "practice makes perfect" would probably not be one of them.

"The more records you make, the harder it is to make them," the British singer-guitarist is saying during a recent Toronto visit to promote his band's fifth album, Wishville, which comes out today.

"If you're trying to make a progressive statement different from your previous record, which is something we've always tried to do, your avenues are limited each time because you don't want to repeat yourself."

Then again, groups can toil at not repeating themselves so much they just repeat themselves not repeating themselves.

Looking at The Catherine Wheel's discography, Dickinson sensed this was the case. There were the sweeping shoe-gazer statements Ferment (1991) and Chrome (1993) -- albums that didn't exactly go over like gangbusters on the Great Yarmouth, England, band's home sod, but established them as alt-rock faves here in southern Ontario -- and the avant-grunge makeover of 1995's Happy Days and 1997's Adam & Eve.

Wishville, a concise but dense collection of weird, melodic rockers, demanded a re-design. Scaled down from a quartet to a trio, Dickinson, guitarist Brian Futter and drummer Neil Sims called on longtime studio keyboardist Tim Friese-Green, known for his work with '80s cult favourites Talk Talk.

Says Dickinson: "Tim stated, quite astutely, that if you can change as many of the modus operandi that go into making a record, whether it's the way you write the songs, the raw material you choose from, or the way you record it, that you will hit on something new.

"We thought it was important that we have just 40 minutes of music. I think the last record was a bit of a concept record in a lot of people's minds, and we wanted something diametrically opposed to that: Just the nine best songs we could write."

The singer says he and Futter spent 13 months writing and editing 40 songs before recording at the band's home studio.

"We wrote songs in isolation and met up every two months to play them," he says. "We didn't rehearse songs with the band for nine months. When we actually did sit down, there were a lot of songs to play rather than a lot of songs to wade through."

As for how a band systematically ditches 31 songs?

"With a heavy heart," he says, smiling. "But every time we make a record, we kind of bury our heads in the sand and make it to please ourselves. We haven't had the burden of huge success around our necks to muddy the waters of creativity. Every record is a clean sheet for us."