By Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

When The Bird and the Bee’s frontwoman Inara George sings, “I’m a broken heart” over a resplendent, down-tempo wash that practically glitters with atmosphere, there’s a frivolousness hiding in her voice even as a more pointed sorrow emerges from the polished grandeur of the music in her next line, “my love is bleeding.” Such is The Bird and the Bee’s penchant for balancing moods, and also for creating seamless musical fusions. Consisting of George and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin, The Bird and the Bee arose from a casual, off-the-cuff musical encounter between the two when they found themselves sitting at a piano on a break while recording George’s 2005 solo album, All Rise. The unexpected ease with which they found themselves writing material perhaps accounts for how naturally the duo combines elements of classic vocal jazz, bossa nova, lounge, sun-drenched California pop from the 1960s and ’70s, and golden-age Hollywood musicals wrapped in a bright, bouncy electro-pop sheen.

Like a pair of tipsy chefs concocting hors d’oeuvres and bonbons at a party, George and Kurstin vary the balance of ingredients in their recipe quite a bit from song to song on both their self-titled debut album, and the new, slightly darker EP, Please Clap Your Hands. Most alluringly, however, they represent one of the few outlets in the contemporary cultural landscape to so totally invoke lounge music without pandering to kitsch. It’s a masterful move, and thankfully, you can’t detect one iota of irony, smarm or unseemly pop-culture obsessiveness in Kurstin’s playing. Likewise, George approaches her subjects with the irreverent hand of an unpretentious poet focused on modern, everyday situations. Her own distinct presence radiates within the music, so it’s not like she’s playing out her Audrey Hepburn fantasies, although such reference points are obviously there.

On last year’s dance hit from the duo, “Fucking Boyfriend,” George is able to use flagrant obscenity in the song’s chorus, managing not only to be coy and even demure about it, but also hints at the yearning and frustration of being attracted to a cad. You can hear it in her voice: She knows he’s probably not going to commit, but you might be too busy moving your feet by then. Clap Your Hands opens with “Polite Dance Song,” a rousing number with the brooding introspective flair of, say, Morcheeba, and the dramatic build-up of a film unfolding towards its climax. Again, however, as George repeatedly sings “pardon me for losing my cooling,” her touch is subtle enough that it’s hard to tell exactly where she’s coming from. If there’s either earnest regret or sarcasm in her voice, you’ll have to dig it out. But you might still find yourself too busy dancing.

Which is not to say that The Bird and the Bee don’t offer us a fair share of quiet moments, or that they’re even a dance act per se. The full-length contains many a nook and cranny for listeners to fall into a kind of blissful state of melancholy. But the music also sounds just as at home in a nightclub or supermarket. And it has such an emotional transparency that you can slip it on in a multitude of settings: while sitting around sipping martinis, re-tiling your roof, getting busy in the bedroom, pining away for someone or staring out a window on a moving train.

An affable bunch who answer questions in tandem and play off of each other not unlike a kinder, cheerier version of Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, George and Kurstin say they enjoy art that plays on different levels. Though Kurstin plays all the instruments, The Bird and the Bee is the most collaborative situation in which he and George have ever been involved. Arguably, the writing interplay between them brings different shades out of George than what she’s revealed in the past.

“Because I’m writing with someone else and I’m also taking on these themes and these characters,” she explains, “There’s a little more fun to it than my solo work. It’s playing on the things that I grew up on as a little girl watching musicals on TV. And old standards. You can say ‘I love you’ in so many ways, but they did it in such a playful way. I try to do that, where there’s more to it if you listen to the lyrics.”

Nov. 18, Blender Theatre at Gramercy, 127 E. 23rd St. (betw. Lexington Ave. & Park Ave. S.), 212-777-6800; 7:30, $15.