TORONTO (CP) - It is a bleak, bleak world into which Our Lady Peace has brought its third album. At a time when the Toronto band should be wallowing in the success generated by the two-million selling 1997 album Clumsy, singer Raine Maida, guitarist Mike Turner, drummer Jeremy Taggart and bassist Duncan Coutts are ruminating about death and the unhappy state of things.

The new record, Happiness . . . Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch, resounds with images of quiet desperation: in the lead-off single One Man Army, Maida sings about "plastic people," asking "is there anything that makes them sound sincere?"

On Happiness and the Fish, he intones "Everyone you meet today is feeling useless and ashamed" and "everyone you meet today is just so . . . vain."

It's certainly not a reflection of the state of their career, which is in mid-blossom. A week before the release of the album stateside, they've already secured a Top 20 standing for One Man Army on the prestigious Billboard magazine rock chart and a spot on the Woodstock 1999 live album.

Maida himself was recently rumoured to have become engaged to longtime girlfriend singer Chantal Kreviazuk. Happy as such an event might be, "I won't talk about it, anyway," says Maida.

"That's our personal life, that's sacred to us."

So where has this rather bleak view that "the world is just a blister" come from?

"It's all about getting close to that extreme, in which everything is glamourized to such an extent - from porn to sensationalizing death - we're desensitized, I think," says Maida, "pretty much completely desensitized."

Not exactly the kind of statement that would fit well into the world of rock music, which is currently undergoing a phase in which light pop anthems like Sugar Ray's Every Morning and the Offspring's Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) hold chart-topping positions for months at a time. But it shows that members of Our Lady Peace have been thinking, trying to digest events going on around them in the world.

"This is kind of the way we are as people," explains Taggart.

"We've been known, the four of us together, to discuss and debate and argue over things instead of drinking on the road. We'll have a show and then we'll talk for like four hours, heat ourselves up and get excited," he says.

"By the end of it we're all still friends, and we're mentally stimulated."

The band's discussions ran consistently to the "sameness" creeping into cultures around the world courtesy of TV, advertising, big corporations and the media, what they call "the McDonald's factor."

"In the middle of nowhere in Spain, you can think, 'There's nowhere like this on earth,' " says Taggart.

"Then you can drive for an hour and go for a big Mac. The sameness, the culture of the world just moulding into one thing, I think that scares me the most."

"You feel like the individuality is sucked out of everything," adds Maida. So if the album reflects a cynicism, its origins are self-scrutiny: instead of crafting jangly, meaningless pop songs to please radio programmers, the band isolated itself at producer Arnold Lanni's studio and considered the heavy topics that had been rattling around in their conversations.

"It's in our being, which is obviously filtered into our music," he says.

"Right now, the biggest statement we wanted to make with this record - not that we're trying to make any grandiose statement - but for us we wanted to make it sound slightly original."

"We wanted to show that out of '90s music and what's going to come up in the next 10 years - where our albums will sit - we wanted to make sure it's something that we feel comfortable with, that can't be easily categorized."

"We want to just make a record that people think, 'You know what? That's Our Lady Peace.' and not be reminded of something else."

Some facts about Our Lady Peace:

Formed: Toronto, 1993

Members: Raine Maida, vocals. Mike Turner, guitar. Jeremy Taggart, drums. Duncan Coutts, bass.

Albums:
Naveed (Sony) 1994
Clumsy (Sony) 1997
Happiness . . . Is A Fish That You Can't Catch (Sony) 1999

Quote: "We know that if someone likes this (record) it's because they like Our Lady Peace: it's not because they hear some other sound-alike band and they're connected to it in that sense." - Raine Maida.