MK Ultra like to make stuff up. The band told journalists that the songs on their fine self-released CD "Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" had been written for a never-completed movie by fictitious filmmaker Tommy Borgnine ("He did have famous relatives, but I can't be specific," singer-guitarists-lyricist John Vanderslice told the Kalamazoo Gazette), who supposedly vanished under mysterious circumstances, taking all the footage with him.

On the evidence of Friday's performance at Bottom of the Hill, the band's songs would make a terrible soundtrack: the narratives are too strong, the images too sharp, and the music too loaded with drama, conflict, and surprise. There'd be nothing left for a director to do.

MK Ultra's ambition sets them apart from their peers. Like a lot of indie kids, they've swiped a few simple, endlessly reworkable elements from the rock tradition - scratchy power-pop riffing, stereophonic new-wave harmonies, and contemporary indie-guitar skronk - and recombined them in unconventional ways. But the result has little in common with the dumb jokes and cut-'n'-paste quotations that pass for innovation lately; MK Ultra actually want to speak through the new language they invent.

Live, the four musicians attacked the songs separately, from all sides, piling voices and guitars on top of one another, shifting the elements piece by piece rather than all together. And they deliberately blurred the intersections of verses and choruses. This approach allowed the band a route out of old-fashioned tension-and-release dynamics: rather than building and climaxing like most rock bands do, they added and subtracted.

In hands of lesser songwriters the result might be abstruse, or at least clinical and detached. But MK Ultra's songs are magnetic: riffs came flying at them from every direction, and somehow they all stuck. Beneath the shifting surface of the music was sweet-and-sour pop that cohered for brief moments and dissolved without reaching any happy endings. The music was hooky in two senses: catchy and barbed - sharp enough to draw you in, and bent enough to keep you there. Heartbreaking, melt-in-your-mouth moments of swollen harmony rooted the set in traditional pop principles of pleasure and sadness, underscoring the emotional
power of the trickier material.

The band opened with "True Crime," which Vanderslice sang from the point of view of a lover of snuff movies, his lyrics shifting from tentative confession to naked eagerness. "Birds Don't Know..." was sleek and sexy, like a '60s Bond film; Vanderslice, guitarist John Tyner, and bassist Dan Carr intertwined strutting licks over drummer Matt Torrey's low harmonies and lurching groove. "What I Live For" and "Santa Maria" - the latter delivered by Vanderslice alone when a blown bass string put Carr temporarily out of commission - were more straightforward than most of the band's material, with melodies whose richness helped the songs' desolate undertow take hold.

Vanderslice sang with a look of wide-eyed, innocent concentration, as though lines like "Your legs remind me of clappers in a bell" were occurring to him for the first time. His lyrics skip from politics to philosophy to psychodrama, but they're not really about any of those things. They're made up of discreet, vivid snapshots and vague stories, like clues to a conspiracy that has yet to surface.

But if Vanderslice constructs his songs from bits and pieces, he's not being willfully postmodern; he doesn't patronize his ideas and images by treating them as meaningless fragments or empty signifiers. Just the opposite: he offers up small facts and images to show how much meaning details like these - trashy movies, the
size of the Grand Canyon, and observation about a lover's legs and the clappers of a bell - have in our lives.

With his blank stare and transparent voice he became one person after another, each possessed by his or her private stock of thoughts and memories - a child playing hide and seek, a sailor on the "Santa Maria", a drug addict, the addict's father. The rich, disjointed music gave each fragment a specific emotional charge but never reconciled them.

The result suggested a unified narrative beyond the singer's grasp, an elusive understanding that could make sense of all the rhythms, swoops, and jolts that made up MK Ultra's songs - an understanding that would fall into place if we could only get all the facts, find the missing footage. It was thrilling to watch MK Ultra flirt with coherence, only to find it just out of reach.