As discussed in MBS-3554 and PICARD-77 including artist/duration/album in a tag lookup causes the MB server to do a recording search. This is different than it behaved pre-NGS, but unavoidable since the search is now based on the indexed search, and the total album length is not part of this index.

Compare
http://musicbrainz.org/taglookup?tport=8000&artist=Nine Inch Nails&release=Downward Spiral&track=&tracknum=&filename=&puid=

with
http://musicbrainz.org/taglookup?tag-lookup.artist=Nine+Inch+Nails&tag-lookup.release=Downward+Spiral&tag-lookup.tracknum=&tag-lookup.track=&tag-lookup.duration=255456&tag-lookup.filename=&tag-lookup.puid=

For now; suggest removing the duration from the search parameters when doing a lookup for an album or a cluster (files/tracks/recordings will still included it). To make this work better, we will need to add more to taglookup on the server, e.g. allow including # tracks (and/or # discs, for future proofing when Picard can handle it more nicely).