Well, it's official, folks. The present is extremely disappointing, so let's bury our heads in the past, sayeth the Lords of Hip at Jetset Records. Why aren't we living like the Jetsons yet, they ask? It's about time we all turn our minds to an era when lots of ugly, hairy, smelly people wore more flowers than actual clothes, and everyone was always uncontrollably happy and had unprotected sex with anything warm-blooded. And, of course, it was also a time of much personal liberation, when the average citizen had LSD on toast for breakfast every morning. Yeah, that's the 60's, baby.

You see, Songs for the Jet Set is the product of a retro-crazed UK collective hell-bent on re-creating and foisting a revisionist 60's utopia on the fair people of our time. Songs For the Jet Set promotes a certain musical sub-genre that, back in 1966, would've been considered harmless adult-contemporary, politically-neutral dinner/leisure music, probably loathed by anyone under 30. Now this felicitous feather-pop is target-marketed to today's young Beatle-lookalike mop-tops and post-mod lounge lizards. With the recent downturn of the swing craze, Jet Set is singlehandedly attempting to effect the mass acceptance of yet another groovy cousin of Cocktail Nation. Yeah, baby, yeah!

The made-up bands here revel in the sounds of campy, easy-listening exotica initially made popular by the likes of fluff gurus Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, Astrud Gilberto, Henry Mancini, and Martin Denny, and if you know popular soundtrack music like "Never On Sunday" and the much-covered 60's standard "Lolita Ya-Ya," then you probably understand what this so-called "Cinema-pop" collective is shooting for. Yes, it's the re-packaged, re-interpreted sounds of Swinging London. Yet the key to the appeal of volumes one and two of this series was the seemingly inexhaustible supply of happiness, light-headed lyrics, cream- in- your- chinos female vocals, and generally silly mood music that would melt the frozen hearts of ultra-modernist retro-hating critics everywhere.

Volume Three begins with a limbo-rock beach party song, "El Graphic," with the requisite "pa-pa-pa-pa's" peppering a giddy instrumental track featuring the then (and, uh, now) trendy calypso/bossa nova glaze-over. But with songs already meant to provide only the most unchallenging and transitory of pleasures, on "Bears," they seem to out-dumb themselves with the inane nonsense lyrics that sound like, not sixties psychedelia-based so much, but some childish crap inspired by Peter Paul and Mary, or Paul and Linda McCartney for that matter.

Faux-band Wallpaper, responsible for the highlight tracks of Volume Two, again come through on Volume Three with a couple of real triumphs in 60's pastiche. They specialize in perfectly-dated, always criminally-catchy guitar instrumentals. "At the Art Museum" evokes the ancient but still essential spirit of the Ventures and, actually more specifically, a Duane Eddy/Ventures revival band like the Raybeats. On "Dreams That Money Can't Buy," they exhibit their usual flair for retro-ripoff artistry, with this time-warp guitar composition falling somewhere in the vicinity of "Greensleeves" and, say, the Our Man Flint soundtrack.

Overall, I didn't get quite the same sense of love-generation euphoria bursting from every delicate rose-petal note here, as was certainly the case on the first two volumes. And too many tracks seem to actually (gasp!) take themselves seriously. Sometimes, all the cute warbling tends to lose its spunk and appeal, dissipating into a mealy-mouthed washout of a number like "Willow's Song." About half the tracks lack that insouciant twist-party-by-the-pool feel and, towards the end of the CD, trails off into little more than lifeless neo-psychedelic droning, as if they were all finally physically and mentally exhausted from such rigid adherence to the same ultra-groovy stylistic schtick for so damn long.

Nevertheless, it's hard to say Jetset Records hasn't done our static millennial techno-culture a favor by putting out this Songs For the Jet Set series. Maybe it's just that three volumes is too much happy-happy joy-joy hippie shit for anyone but Austin Powers to really appreciate. Or maybe it's just not enough. In an age where indie melancholy, indifference, and subtlety rule, this is simply pure escapist fun, free of troubling thoughts, anger, irony, cynicism, and politics. This music offers nothing that could be mistaken for complexity or substance. As for substance? You'll need to provide that yourself. Plug in that dusty lava lamp, spark up a humdinger of a joint, and drift off into carefree, revisionist 60's la-la land with the Songs For the Jet Set series. Although, truthfully, you can probably skip this particular volume and have an equally smashing time, baby.

-Michael Sandlin