If you're going to start a lengthy tour, you might as well throw yourself directly into the fire.

For West Coast Canadian pop band Stabilo, that meant performing a couple of dates in the Valhalla known as Whistler for crowds of spring skiers and snowboarders during reading week festivities.

Or, as band member Jesse Dryfhout nicely sums up: "Drunken barbarians."

The shows, though, did help them work the live kinks out of songs from their latest release Happiness & Disaster -- their major label full-length, which follows their 2004 EP Cupid featuring the hit Everybody (also tacked onto the new disc).

It's an intriguing album, with acoustic pop elements and odd stylistic choices, which makes it hard to peg down and define -- a rock record one minute, roots the next, Crowded House pop the next, and so on.

"We don't go into it and say, 'This song sounds like this so this song has to sound like this,' " Dryfhout explains.

"Every day is different and every experience is different, so I think albums should have completely different feels from one song to the next.

"I really think it should be a journey."

Still, Happiness and Disaster is a remarkably cohesive record, especially considering the band employs two songwriters who split the duties almost evenly -- Dryfhout and Christopher John.

Dryfhout does, though, say there usually is one song each is willing to fight for, noting his on this record was the lead-off track Don't Look In Their Eyes -- one of the album's highlights.

Though it was one against three, it wasn't a battle he was willing to back down from.

"Now it's going to be a single, so it's a good thing we kept it on," he says, laughingly denying he now holds it over the rest of the band.

"No, no," he says, then pauses briefly.

"Maybe if it's a hit I will."

Stabilo plays The Whiskey Monday night.