I used to really like concept albums, but then I kinda grew out of them. The turning point was probably when my interest in Who's Next eclipsed my interest in Tommy.

Maybe every album is a concept album; maybe no album is. Point is, I don’t know. Maybe no one does, including The Foundry Field Recordings, but they made one anyway. Just don’t ask me what the concept is.

Er, wait. You’ll have to ask what it is or else this thing won’t go anywhere, and it needs to go somewhere. It says "The Foundry Field Recordings" at the top of the page and I’ve mentioned them only twice now. So what’s the concept, anyway? Well, I don’t really know. It’s definitely about war, an us-versus-them occasion of pretty nasty proportions. But even an imbecile can figure that out.

This may seem an adolescent response, but it’s really hard to tell what’s going on when the lyrics on Prompts/Miscues are incredibly nebulous. “Incredibly” here is not a negative. No, what I’m saying is it’s incredible that the lyrics to these songs are so beguiling that they really put the “story”—if there is one—in the listener’s hands/mind.

Even in the enlightened we’re-all-equal-brothers-and-sisters Sixties the Who didn’t think that would fly. Prompts/Miscues—and I would just as soon stab myself as write this, but here I go—is similar to certain poetry or prose of the purely on-the-page sort in that it leaves itself wide open to interpretation. Take it from one angle and you emerge with one reading, take it from another and etc.

I’m not sure how to take it. I keep coming back to the “us versus them” thing. The first three songs (“Battle Brigades” parts I and II and “Warning Raids Over Kiev”) make that especially hard to shake with their titles alone. And hell, the first lines of “Battle Brigades Part II” (Part I is a dreamy, setting-up-the-epic-tale instrumental) are “Clobbered the / Russian revolution / With your army of silver men.” Us versus them check.

But who are the silver men? Aliens? Robots? What does the Russian revolution have to do with aliens and robots? Immediately, the Foundry Field Recordings get us questioning the story, and that’s precisely what they have to do for this to work. But I say this only after hearing the album multiple times. While those lines certainly have a feel unlike the lyrics of most stand-alone songs, the concept of Prompts/Miscues is so inexplicit that it would be very, very easy to assume there’s no concept at all on the first listen. There’s no “story,” just maybe a hint of a theme.

Or a few dozen hints, since the wartime vocabulary pops up everywhere: infantry, battle ships, graves, towns engulfed in flames, warning raids, machines, and the list goes on. But where this disc really succeeds is in the fact that the Foundry Field Recordings manage to not beat the war stuff to death. It surfaces and slightly re-colors each song. The downside, in terms of it’d be nice to point you to a song or two and say, “Here’s a point of entry,” is that the only real point of entry on this album is “Battle Brigades Part I.” Even the really stellar songs almost wind up being too lyrically obscure to stand alone. But that’s not really a bad thing. Prompts/Miscues is an album, after all, and not one of those albums that’s both an album and a collection of songs, if you catch my drift.

That said, even this album has a couple of standout tracks. My favorite, “Buried Beneath the Winter Frames,” is the shortest song on the record: a couple verses and a catchy and baffling chorus. Who am I kidding, the verses are baffling, too: “And don’t carry on / And don’t count me out / We’re buried beneath the / Winter frames / And they’re all gone.” That’s the whole first verse. What could that “mean”?

The second verse: “Metal rained for an hour / It caused a shift in power / The next one / Sticks and stones / And they’re all gone.” “Metal rained for an hour” is a great image. “It caused a shift in power” re-evokes the military theme, but what about the rest? Well, the “next one” must be the next hour, which makes two hours of weird crap falling from the sky, and kudos to lyricist Billy Schuh—he’s the singer, too—for making this listener question the lyric in the first place.

The chorus, though, is what really gets me: “Nobody knows where you are / And I want to see it again.” Gimme a minute, I’m looking for a nice, sturdy limb. . . . Okay, is this some sort of commentary on how we as a culture (oh, this is getting dangerous) are conflicted between the human cost of war and the crash-bam-boom of bombing the shit out of things? Because the Foundry Field Recordings don’t say “I want to see you again.” Not “you”—“it.” What is “it”? What else could “it” be?

“Buried Beneath the Winter Frames” has such a deceptively simple lyric, and such a good one in terms of subtly advancing the “concept” or “theme,” that it deserves to be married to music just as straightforward on the surface, and it sort of is. The track kicks off with some monster drums, which have the effect of both John Bonham on Zeppelin’s “Four Sticks” and Hal Blaine on the Ronettes’ version of “I Wonder,” meaning that they sound like the apocalypse is upon us and while it’s scary as all get-out it also sounds really, really amazing, and gets your heart pumping faster than is necessary or safe.

On “Buried” they actually don’t stick to a set rhythm at first; it’s kinda all over the place and hard to groove along with. But the rhythm guitar really gets the song going, and it’s the all-star instrument this time around, propelling things along with a very basic chord progression. It’s a real toe-tapper, one of the only uptempo songs on the disc, and catchy, catchy, catchy.