“Little Bit of Blue” by What Time Is It, Mr. Fox? takes you to a smoky cafe where lonely lovers sip bittersweet absinthe, while over in the corner a piano player – accompanied by baleful strings, a smooth jazzy drummer and a sultry female quintet – provides the sound track to your romantic triumphs and disasters. Enter a world where Cee Lo Green meets Maurice Chevalier, soul meets jazz standard, and the crisp execution of classically trained musicians intersects with the heartfelt mysteries of the blues. In top hats and black suits, the aesthetic is curiously nineteenth century, but the polished production of this CD – beautifully recorded at Bang a Song Studios in Gloucester, Massachusetts – mark it as a thoroughly twenty-first century product.

Along with French love ballads, some influences are clear and intriguing. “Deep Waters” owes a debt to PJ Harvey’s creepy 1995 alt hit “Down by the Water,” but that’s what brands this effort as a pop creation; in pop music influences are traded and mixed and reborn as new songs. The glue that holds every song together is the assured singing of 3rian King (I suppose his friends call him the more prosaic “Brian”), which makes no attempt to fill an arena but rather draws you closer, as if he were handing you a snifter of brandy by a crackling fire.

The mood is indigo and the night is long, so put on your smoking jacket or Japanese silk robe, dream of lost loves and imagine new ones, and let this genre-defying collection take you across moonlit fields in a sleigh pulled by a team of cunning red foxes.