Given the commercial and critical regard for singer-songwriter pop experimentation from the likes of Beck and Bjork and the healthy adult contemporary appreciation for such sincerely eclectic Latin American romantics as Tom Ze and Bebel Gilberto, Juana Molina’s continued comparisons to such niche-market gossamer pop as Beth Orton don’t do her any favors. Molina, a mid-40s former Argentine television comedienne, is as stylistically sly as the most risky of pop producers, and even better, isn’t unafraid to create unabashedly pretty music purely for its own sake. And while her fourth album,”Son” (Domino), isn’t going to storm National Public Radio or college radio playlists, it’s a plush, inventive next step in her continued recombination of traditional Latin folk and forward-thinking electronics.

In fact, the 14 songs on “Son” are a woozy collusion of her previous two albums. The gamine folk of her 2003 sophomore effort, “Segundo,” is interlaced with the electronic wit of her 2004 “Tres Cosas,” balancing a delicate seesaw between the weird and the winsome. Songs start with a simple guitar figure or keyboard line; Molina’s ethereal voice comes in gymnastically eliding her sing-song Spanish lyrics and electronic textures and percolating rhythms slowly drop in behind her to spin songs into discombobulating doses of good cheer.

Molina whips up a melange of pop songs from simple recipes. A fingerpicked guitar filigree sculpts the delicate background melody in “La Verdad” as her modestly nasal, honeyed rasp exhales, “A truth is invented with the great precision and immense work of the imagination.” (These English translations are by this reviewer; note: It sounds much more eloquent in her Spanish.) Bird calls and a swelling tone slice through the background of the mix, and after the second verse – “I do not want reluctance, nor a lack of passion” – a peppering of percussions and keyboards come in and complicate the melody, implying a quickening of the pace even though it stays at an excited heartbeat’s pulse. Soon, Molina – who wrote, produced, and recorded the lion’s share of this album – takes syllable snippets of her vocals and loops them into a paisley of verbal volleys.

She follows the same basic blueprint in the even more streamlined “Micael;” its only lyric is the prayer-like “Micael, luminous beings make us valiant, archangel Micael.” For two minutes Molina plaintively sings “Micael” as a swooning dirge, her only accompaniment the ruminative guitar and a light dust of subtle drums; then she spins the tune into an Ellen Allien experiment with ricocheting vocal swooshes, syncopated percussion tracks, and a swell of synthesizers.

Granted, a few songs into “Son” this recipe starts to feel like just that – a formula. But what keeps the album from becoming just another roll of recorded wallpaper is Molina’s transfixing presence. She sings with a sultry sleepiness, as if she just awoke from a late afternoon nap. And what she sings is equally beguiling. Her songs are more observational than narrative, and how she chooses to illustrate feelings and situations is as engaging as the music. Hackneyed subjects such as love’s absence are handled with simple elegance, as in “Rio Seco”: “I don’t want to see more of everyone who has gone / my broken heart has seen them, it speaks and tells me that nothing remains.”

When all Molina’s quirks combine perfectly, they yield a dazzling tonic. The tender goodbye to a past lover, “Yo No” (“Not I”), begins with a characteristically simple guitar melody and a swaying back-and-forth drum beat and slowly builds into a whorl of swirling noises, percussion textures, sheets of non sequitur keyboard tones, and a flurry of her dizzying vocal hiccups – breathy “ahhs,” gentle coos. She eases into the wonder of the second verse – “Who’ll be patient with him? / Who is going to give him a hand? / He is never going to change” – before offering the titular send-off in a gorgeously romantic breeze of her multi-tracked voice. Molina really only mines such bittersweet moods on “Son,” but there are much worse things than being aural aloe vera for a sunburned soul.

Juana Molina will perform with Jose Gonzalez on June 29 and July 3 at the Bowery Ballroom (6 Delancey Street, between Bowery and Chrystie Street, 212-533-2111).