STAN RIDGWAY “Mosquitos.” Geffen ***: <i> Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to five stars (a classic). </i>

You’ll find the mosquitoes of the album’s title squashed against a windshield, which pretty much typifies the condition of Ridgway’s characters through the first half of this semi-literary opus. Saps and suckers are swept up in a ridiculously fevered cops-and-robbers adventure (“Goin’ Southbound”), crushed in a fatal love trap (“Peg and Pete and Me”) and literally flattened by a falling piano (“Can’t Complain”). Ridgway’s droll delivery usually gives him just the right distance from his pulp-fiction moralizing, but when he goes for non-ironic moralizing (“Last Honest Man,” “Newspapers”), he becomes trite.

The music, mainly in a heavily orchestrated new-wave vein, is sometimes finely atmospheric (in “Lonely Town” the tones shimmer like waves of heat off the highway), sometimes dryly mechanical, sometimes wildly eclectic (sitar and accordion, together for the first time). Ridgway is becoming as much actor as singer: In “Can’t Complain” he simply talks, and he can drop words out of the side of his mouth like an old geezer dribbling tobacco juice. At his best, he locates the deadened voice of a loser Everyman--and stirs up the humor and the hope inside it.