Putting out a half-hour-long album full of jangly, reverb-heavy guitar pop songs with more female harmonies than a girls school’s choir might seem risky after Best Coast’s triumphant full-length debut. To do it as a band singing in the not exactly widely-spoken Catalan idiom borders on the futile. Or does it?

Aias are, numerically and stylistically, similar to the Vivian Girls – three young ladies playing songs inspired by bands they love, the only way they know how: unpolished, somewhat twee, and with an enthusiasm that makes the twee bit forgivable. But instead of pushing their C86-worship over the edge of unoriginality and cringeworthiness by trying to sing in a foreign language, Aias stamp their own cultural identity all over A La Piscina. The Catalan dialect (to this linguistically challenged reviewer anyway) sounds like a mixture of Latin and Brazilian Portugese, which has, on balance, a positive effect on the music. It lends the lo-fi songs a choral, almost pastoral air – a bit like Dum Dum Girls jamming in a countryside chapel after nicking some ancient hymn sheets from the broom cupboard. Combined with the audibly Spector-influenced, honey-dripping harmonies, this makes for an exotic touch that, whilst not inversing the noise pop genre, sets Aias apart from their stateside and UK peers and makes them a great fit for the awesome (and uber-cool) Captured Tracks label (who have released records by Wild Nothing, Thee Oh Sees and, yes, Dum Dum Girls)

The songs themselves are catchy in the way half of the first Vivian Girls album was catchy (and almost no songs on the second Vivian Girls album were). Opener ‘Tu Manes’ (apparently Catalan for “you tell me what to do”) is endearingly simple in its structure and arrangement (middle 8s are not in Aias’ toolbox), but from the moment Laia Aubia (drums) and Miriam Garcia (bass) join guitarist and lead singer Gaia Bhir on her way to the chorus, most people with ears will have started bobbing their head in approval.

The fan-girl nod to The Ramones’ ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ in ‘Una Semana Sincera’ will cause either knowing smiles or sneers, but the cheeky brass bits on ‘A La Piscina’ and ‘Aias’ take the biscuit in terms of in-your-face breeziness. Now that the summer is over and the Best Coast album has been played to death (it really is that good), people might not be in the mood for what is basically the soundtrack to a summer spent drinking beer and trying to get the girl in the Pixies t-shirt to talk to you, but they’d be missing out on something genuinely fun, shambolic and just a tad different.