At least they might not get lumped in with freak folk anymore. Backstory-rich Brooklyn duo CocoRosie brighten the sylvan hip-hop warble of their divisive earlier efforts with higher recording fidelity and Maurice Sendakian twee-pop instrumentation on their bloated third LP The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn, the most tellingly titled concept album since the Dandy Warhols imploded for 2005's Odditorium or Warlords of Mars. Don't worry, CocoRosie are still friends with Devendra Banhart, Icelandic guys who engineer Björk records, and other people much cooler than you.

Too bad it seems as if the more self-impressed CocoRosie sisters Bianca and Sierra Casady get about transcending genres, the less patience they have for mere mortal concerns like, um, songs. True, Ghosthorse and Stillborn begins with CocoRosie at their most radio-ready, on single "Rainbowarriors", where Bianca speak-sings impishly about finding "the rainbow trail that's deep inside ya" over beatbox schmaltz. It's something like Vitamin C's 1999 Top 40 hit "Graduation (Friends Forever)", only with neighing horses, buzzing synths, and Sierra's operatic soprano instead of Pachelbel-derived orchestral Radio Disney pomp/circumstance. Next, "Promise" is the record's most direct engagement with hip-hop, Bianca rapping about "carry[ing] this carapace" and "burnt silver brushed lavender offspring" with the unhurried flow of late-90s UK figures like Faithless emcees Rollo and Maxi Jazz. Think Joanna Newsom with shittier pot and nobody to edit her.

More often, though, Ghosthorse and Stillborn tends toward lazy, meandering nothings: The indecipherable music-box aria of "Bloody Twins", the babyish moocow soundscape of "Black Poppies", and the Banhart-penned piano moroseness of "Houses". ("Big houses burn down," Sierra sings to the rafters.) Finale "Miracle" features a simple "I'll be your girl/ I'll be your boy" refrain tailor-made for incoherent gender-theory theses. On spoken-word fragment "Girl and the Geese", an Antony-like male voice intones, "As she did so, she turned into a geese/ It was then revealed that the other geese she magically had understood were once human like her," apparently under the influence of whichever drugs cause a grown man not to know the word "goose." I mean, it's never "duck, duck, geese," is it?

Alas, this album gets much, much worse. Bianca dons an unbearable Sebastian-the-singing-crab Jamaican accent for the loping harp-calypso of "Japan", in which she: 1) Steps into the Six Flags-length queue of weak singers who've seen fit to remind us "life is like a rollercoaster," 2) Blithely parodies/paraphrases the Bobby Knight take on rape (i.e., "say, 'thank you!'"), 3) Offers some vapid chirps about the war in Iraq, and 4) Enjoins us, "Everybody, just hold hands." Sierra's classically trained vocal scales waft out of nowhere to interrupt the unholy proceeding, as if producer Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Will Oldham) hit pause while walking past a university music building.

Despite the troupe's avant-garde raiment, CocoRosie's lyrics rarely get past art-school cliché. On "Animals", Bianca makes empty, free-associative leaps from the Mafia to porno to tobacco to "a mini-disastro, bigger than the Ice Age/ Don't know if baby dinosaurs maybe could live through it/ Or Indians and butterflies/ What's crushed is my spirit/ Oh, I fear it is too fragile."

Father-conflicted "Werewolf" starts with a male voice describing a dream of being a werewolf, before Bianca proudly declares supposed shock'n'awe lines like "I suck dick" beside such trite juxtapositions as "stains on my sheets and stains on my soul" and lousy music writer words like "coruscate." Other people's dreams can be beautifully told, as in Michel Gondry films or Cocteau Twins LPs, but most of the time they're just boring: Some dude tells me he had a nightmare about his boss turning into a mule-hung Valkyrie (TMI, bro), and I'm all, yeah, let me tell you about the dream I had snorting sea monkeys with Billy Corgan. It takes craft to overcome this fundamentally human "meh"; CocoRosie have ambition instead.