If you take all that is beautiful in this world and distill it into 50 minutes of pure sonic bliss, you'll have something that sounds a lot like The Dream of a Modern Day. That’s quite hefty praise, you might say (and you would be right), but the simple truth is that albums like this don’t come along every day -- or every month, year or decade for that matter. What this New York-based group has done on The Dream of a Modern Day is to drain every ounce of pure energy, love, hope and fear from their frail bodies and channel that straight onto tape. It is, in a word, stunning.

Unfortunately, I was not old enough to appreciate the music coming out of the United Kingdom in the late '80s and early '90s. It was only years later that I stumbled across and subsequently fell in love with the likes of Joy Division, My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver. But with The Dream of a Modern Day, Mahogany have cast themselves as the leaders of a shoegazer/drone pop revival, and for that we should all rejoice. Mahogany impresario Andrew Prinz might just be the Kevin Shields of his generation, pulling strands of wispy melodies and impossibly beautiful noise out of thin air.

Listening to the album is like waking up underwater. Everything around you floats effortlessly; your senses are at their most acute as waves of textured sound swirl around your head. Every single song is steeped in ethereal grandeur, and no matter where you listen to the disc you feel as though you are sitting in a velvet-covered chair in the great hall of some thousand-year-old theatre. The sheer wall of sound created in songs like "The Mystique of the Locomotive" and "Red Marrow, His Sorrow" envelops the listener in heavily treated guitars and angelic vocals. "Soleil Radieux" and "Synchromie no. 1" recall late-era Cocteau Twins with their ranked masses of spacey guitars, intense atmospherics and driving basslines. In fact, you’d have to try pretty hard to find a track on The Dream of a Modern Day that is not a standout.

If there is any justice in this world, by this time next year Mahogany will be huge. They deserve to be talked about in the same manner that people reserve for Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Sigur Ros and the aforementioned My Bloody Valentine. Make absolutely no mistake about it, Mahogany are one of the bands to watch in 2001. The Dream of a Modern Day is destined to be one of those albums that everyone's talking about, and with good reason.