Pitchfork

"Everybody's got screwed up stories/ Everybody's got gruesome details," sings John Vanderslice. "But you'll never get mine/ It's not that bad/ It could never justify my life." Having followed Vanderslice's musical activities for the past few years, I've learned a couple of things about him-- not the least of which is that you should take anything he says with a grain of salt, as his penchant for Negativland-style media pranks all but equals his zeal for exceptionally well-crafted pop songs.

As frontman for the underrated and largely unknown (outside of the San Francisco area, at least) MK Ultra, he's pulled fast ones on the local news outlets such as claiming that the band's 1996 release Original Motion Picture Soundtrack was actually meant to be a soundtrack to a never- released independent film, or that he once bought a 16-track recorder directly from Brian Wilson. And for Mass Suicide Occult Figurines, Vanderslice's first release since MK Ultra's demise in mid-1999, he manufactured a pretty little hoax about being sued by Microsoft for copyright infringement stemming from the song "Bill Gates Must Die."

So why do I find the above lyrics so oddly intriguing? At first glance, it appears as if Vanderslice is taunting us playfully, self-deprecatingly; he won't tell us who he really is because his personal life isn't all that interesting anyway. This initially makes sense, since this is a guy who's written songs about bombing the post office, joining the Red Cross, reminiscing about life during wartime, and stalking the president, among other things. It seems relatively clear that it's not really John himself talking here.

But if he was inventing characters and stories in all those instances, how do we know he's not doing that here as well? Could this apparently straightforward, honest declaration be just another invention? Or have I simply spent way too much time listening to Mass Suicide Occult Figurines and am reading too much into it? Obviously, the answer is yes, but my point is this: Vanderslice is not only developing into a brilliant pop-song craftsman, but he's an adept storyteller as well, blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction so thoroughly that, in the end, the difference doesn't even matter. After all, a good song is still a good song, whether or not it actually tells a true story.

A background check on Mass Suicide Occult Figurines shows the album to be a patched-together affair, incorporating songs culled from the final days of MK Ultra and Vanderslice's solo studio work. And while it's pretty clear which songs fall into which category-- the MK Ultra songs sound more like a live band, and the solo stuff is more lush, a bit moodier, and more intricately arranged-- the track ordering is such that the different songs work to complement each other nicely, resulting in a surprisingly well-paced, varied-sounding (yet still cohesive) album.

There's no overarching theme to Mass Suicide Occult Figurines as there has been on past MK Ultra releases, but it does contain some of Vanderslice's finest work to date. "Confusion Boats" smoothly switches gears between ominous murkiness and a gently swaying verse melody; "Josie Anderson" is a swell-and- recede ballad-about-a-girl with a curious naval-warfare motif ("You are steamboat hips/ Gunpowder lips/ Blue bonfires on the shore").

For some, the fabulously titled "Bill Gates Must Die" would be the centerpiece of this album, but I cast my vote for "Speed Lab" as one of the finest pop songs of the year; it's certainly the catchiest song ever written about illegal drug manufacturing. The terse, jagged riffing is enough to cement it into your brain for weeks, but Vanderslice outdoes himself with the lyrics, spinning an evocative tale of Denis Johnson-style California noir in less than 150 words. While the snarling guitars of "Bill Gates" musical equally those of "Speed Lab," the lyrics seem vague where those of "Speed Lab" are sharply imagined; allusions to paranoia about Internet security loopholes and federal eavesdropping don't quite coalesce into the damning, righteous indictment of Microsoft that the title would suggest. For this particular computer geek, it's a bit of a letdown.

Clocking in at under 35 minutes (and that includes five minutes of not-unwelcome filler), Mass Suicide Occult Figurines is maddeningly short, but it's also in no danger of wearing out its welcome. It's just long enough to not feel lightweight, and short enough to leave you craving more as the "Slow Nerve Action"-esque "Foothills of my Mind" dissolves into an extended coda of processed orchestral swells. And with this album being the first Vanderslice-penned record to receive decent national distribution and promotion, he could be well on his way to becoming the Next Big Indie Thing.