Mahogany: Connectivity!

Beware the dangers of late night online shopping. A few weeks ago Gideon Coe told the story of a listener who was surprised to receive a knock at the door announcing the delivery of a hedgehog house. (As you may know, these are dark days for hedgehogs and they need all the shelter they can get.) It turned out that he had ordered it online after a night in the pub.

Now I'm on several listings and promotional email lists, and at exactly 1am on 23 August, I received a mailing from the Track and Field Organisation, viz:

To cheer you up on these rather dark summer evenings, here's another spanking special offer from Track & Field HQ… Yes, it's the return of the T&F Lucky Dip! Get hold of six (count 'em!) Track & Field CDs in one of our special lucky dip bags. All for the bargain price of 12GBP. You could get anything from Herman Dune to Homescience but I'm sure you'll agree that's still likely to be nothing less than brilliant.

If I'd slept on it, I'd have realised that, no, I don't really need six more unknown CDs. But a week later, six such unknown CDs were delivered to my door. And they were completely unknown: I could only remember hearing the name of one of the bands concerned. They became instant shelfware, waiting for a moment like this.

So I unpicked the cellophane wrapping from this CD, slotted it into my iMac and started up iTunes. You always fear the worst in these circumstances: sludgy indie rock with faux-angst. As the first song began, I checked what my Last.fm plug-in application was saying. The first line read, "Dream pop band Mahogany was formed in December 1995". Ah, dream pop. I can handle that. Not afraid of a melody.

It's no A.R. Kane, though it does have Robin Guthrie doing some production and mixing.

The CD booklet is a thing of beauty: its art direction is by one of the mainstays of the band.

One down, five to go. If you're quick, you might be able to get in on the Lucky Dip yourself.

MusicBrainz entry for this album