“Ghettoville” will probably be the last album Darren Cunningham ever releases as Actress. A shame, in part due to the consistent brilliancy of the project and in part to how frustrating an ending “Ghettoville” is. Actress’s last two albums were an incredible one-two punch: “Splazsh” (2010), a warped dance-music sketchbook, and R.I.P. (2012), a conceptual opus.  Given how much Cunningham and his label Ninja Tune have hyped “Ghettoville” as the conclusion of the Actress project, one might expect it to be the final step in the refinement of his sound.

Yet upon listening to “Ghettoville,” it’s hard to hear anything but a collection of sketches and different routes Actress could potentially have taken.  Though Cunningham has always taken a deconstructionist approach to electronic dance music, “Ghettoville” finds him giving the same treatment to hip-hop, R&B, ’80s club pop and downtempo ambient music. He has dabbled in these styles before but he has never quite immersed himself as much in any of them.

Only some of his new ideas work. Most promising are the hip-hop and R&B-oriented tracks, which could hint at a possible direction for Cunningham’s post-Actress work. “Corner” and “Rap” recall West Coast G-funk, and “Towers” sounds like the intro to some Rick Ross or French Montana banger stretched out and looped over three and a half minutes. Perhaps most impressive is “Rule,” which evokes The Range’s recent experiments with samples of rap verses but is substantially grittier and truer to its source material. Like Actress’s dance-oriented work, these songs could be effective party songs if not for everything in the foreground.

Less effective are the more ambient tracks.  Cunningham’s skill with repurposing drum sounds from trap and techno was one of the main things that made “Splazsh” and “R.I.P.” so effective.  Without the drums, the corrugated soundscapes are less than compelling, not quite interesting enough to be evocative and not immersive enough to get lost in.  And Cunningham puts three of these within the album’s first five tracks.  It’s the first five songs on the album that hold it back from reaching the level of his prior two works, and the album could exponentially improve with the removal of at least two of these songs.

But Cunningham’s still a club kid at heart and it’s the techno tracks that shine the brightest, even if they’re not quite as sonically interesting as the perplexing sound sculptures that dominated R.I.P. “Ghettoville” contains some of Actress’s purest club jams since “Splazsh,” including the standout “Gaze” and the subterranean disco “Skyline.”  That Cunningham includes so much dance-oriented material on his least-dance-oriented album indicates that perhaps “Ghettoville” is an attempt to recap all the ground he has covered thus far under the Actress name.

If this is Cunningham’s goal, “Ghettoville” is an unmitigated failure.  As the conclusion of the Actress project, it’s underwhelming at best.  As a potential indicator of where Cunningham might go after Actress, it’s exploding with promise. “Ghettoville” is the work of a man still overflowing with ideas but unsure where to go with them.  If the material on this album is any indication, we can expect great things once he’s figured it out.