When asked about his favorite bands, Josh Hagan, frontman for the Oak Harbor-based band Shiver, lists a couple of unlikely bedfellows: the Cure and the Replacements. It’s a hard one to wrap your head around. At first glance, it would appear that the dark, melodic mood-music of the Cure cancels out a taste for the Replacements’ wry and propulsive Minneapolis garage pop — much in the same way a taste for Dom Perignon cancels out a thirst for Schlitz.

Now throw into the mix the fact that David Wendling, Shiver’s bassist and a lifelong resident of Oak Harbor, prefers classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and you’ve got a strange brew indeed.

These musical preferences make a lot more sense once you hear Shiver play. The trio, which is rounded out by drummer Mike Perkins, create a sound that is at once edgy and atmospheric, combining an aggressive wall of fuzz with an aura of emotional ambivalence. Hagan’s Brit pop influences battle with the hard rock leanings of Wendling and Perkins, and the results are unique.

“It works out well,” Wendling said of different approaches to music. “It really creates a new type of sound. We’re just striving for something different, something that’s not been done before.”

Shiver’s sound definitely tends toward the anthemic. Hagan’s yearning vocals are augmented by sometimes sonic, sometimes percussive guitarwork, and Perkins’ talented drumming is kinetic (and, every so often, too busy for its own good). Time changes and melodic interludes occur frequently. In the space of a single song, Shiver can get very loud and very quiet, very poppy and then very heavy and crunchy.

“I’m a big fan of having different sounds and different kinds of songs,” Hagan said in an interview last week. “I like to mix it up. Fast songs. Aggressive songs. Pretty songs. Screaming songs.”

When Shiver first formed two years back, the band lacked a singer. They tried out various vocalists, but, as Hagan put it, none of them “were doing anything that was all that exciting.” What Hagan said he was really hoping for was to get a girl in the band.

“I was pulling for a chick singer, but we couldn’t find any girls,” he said. “Every girl sings, but no girl wants to sing into a microphone.”

Finally, Hagan decided to take over singing duties himself, despite his inherent shyness. The job seemed to fit. He said that when he sings, it’s almost as though he’s an actor taking on a character, with the strange twist that “the character would be me.”

For the first half-year they were together, Shiver dedicated themselves to incessant practicing, deciding not to play out until they were ready. Hagan said that he and Perkins and Wendling clicked immediately, though at first they “were writing these really long and repetitive songs.”

No more, though. Musically, the band is tight and focused, their songs anything but repetitive. While the instrumental aspect of songwriting is accomplished by committee — one of the typical strengths of being a rock trio — the task of lyric-writing goes exclusively to Hagan.

“My goal is to write stuff that’s personal to me, but that other people can relate to,” he said. Though he said it’s hard for him to discover a consistent theme in his lyrics, Hagan does mine much of the same territory of Robert Smith (the Cure) and Paul Westerberg (the Replacements). Which is to say, his songs tend toward the emotionally downbeat and heartbroken.

“I don’t write very many happy songs,” he said. “That’s kind of a theme, I guess. Getting screwed over.”

At this point, Shiver have written around 20 songs, and, as Hagan says self-mockingly, “about 10 of them are good.”

From among that handful of “good” songs, Shiver has recorded two 4-song demos, which they eventually compiled into a full, self-released album last summer. “We managed to sell all of them,” Hagan said. More pressings are on the way.

“We’re sticking with that demo,” Wendling said. “We put a lot of money and effort and work into it. We’re hoping it stays fresh for a while.”

Shiver plays every Tuesday night at For Pete’s Sake in Oak Harbor, and just last Sunday they had a show at the Ballard Firehouse in Seattle. They are a good live band, very energetic. As Wendling put it: “Concerts are what I live for. It’s my favorite thing to do.”

“It’s pretty strenuous to play twice a week, but I would love to be playing every night,” Hagan said, who added that he would like nothing better than to make a living at making music. He said he finds the stereotypical punk attitude of not wanting to sell-out and make money ridiculous.

“My ultimate goal would be to be able to do this as a career,” he said. “I would never want to compromise our integrity, but the idea of being able to have roadies that set up your stuff for you is not that bad of a thought.”

Besides, Hagan said, what else is he going to do?

“If I didn’t have music, I’d be hobbyless,” he said. “When I’m not playing my guitar, I’m thinking about it.”