Cola Jet Set

Fizz Guitars: Cola Jet Set Shakes Up Barcelona Indie Pop

By Beverly Bryan
June 7, 2012

Name: Cola Jet Set

Where she’s from: Barcelona, Spain

Genre: indie pop

When they started: 2001

Most Similar: Belle and Sebastian, The Magnetic Fields

Sounds like: Daydreams about the ’60s

The world over, all the finest practitioners of indie-pop are those who serve up a sophisticated cocktail of sweet, old-fashioned melodies and slightly sour lyrics. For certain palates, the mixture can be surprisingly intoxicating. Anyone possessing such a taste should try Barcelona’s Cola Jet Set.

The lyrics are dreamy, delightful, and just a bit off. Meanwhile the playful but artfully arranged guitar pop is a dead-on tribute to the girly ye-ye sound popular throughout Europe in the ’60s. Their sound is so catchy, in fact, that the octet got pretty far in the running to represent Spain in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest, despite the fact that they make good music.

Their non-Spanish-speaking fans can attest to the quality of their product. Unlike bands who record in English to win more fans, Cola Jet Set took the opposite route. While they have always sung in Spanish, with Ana (just Ana) handling the bulk of their delicate, fluttery vocals, the group recently recorded and released an EP called Lesson One: Listen & Repeat with English versions of their songs as a nod to their loyal fans in the UK.

Lesson One: Listen & Repeat also includes this horribly charming cover of The Magnetic Fields’s “Candy”: