Since the hour Thag Jones sought solace in the cave of that cute Neanderthal from across the valley, and honored their union by painting a picture of himself slaying a bison on the rocky wall of their abode, humanity has endeavored to categorize romantic relationships. Psychologist John Allen Lee described six styles of love, an incomplete list that omitted It’ll Never Work You’re Just Too Different – the style experienced by the flip phone toting Neanderthal and Thag, an archaic Homo sapiens who may not have upgraded to the latest iPhone but at least carried a Motorola RAZR – and likewise failed to describe the worst possible type, style, or sub species of relationship, the dreaded Long Distance Relationship. But the worst of the worst relationship is the Long Distance Relationship in which the correspondents see each other on a regular basis, daily or even continuously if they are so unlucky as to find themselves under the same roof.

The divergence of two people progressing from Meet Cute to They’re A Thing Now to a pair of emotionally separated nodes at the forked end of a schlag-ruthe makes for a poignant film called The Break-Up which ended unrealistically in another Meet Cute and a coquettish smile over the shoulder from Jennifer Aniston suggesting a late night “U up?” may lie in the future. With “The more we kept moving the farther away we got from us,” theCatherines remind us that Progress in a relationship may not mean Becoming Closer, and taking The Next Step may mean admitting defeat and Getting the Hell Out of Dodge, taking the Instagram account with you, embracing a future that may be embitteringly lonely but not as lonely as when you were together as a couple.

“The more we kept moving the farther away we got from us” was written and performed by Heiko Schneider of Hamburg, Germany, who describes the track thusly: “The fall brings even theCaths in a kinda melancholy mood and a photo by a friend inspired our first train song… long overdue 😀 so here is our new single, a little baroque-jangle if we may say so…” The song is arguably theCatherines’ best effort to date, a wonderland of Byrdsian guitars and overdubbed harmonies that summon the ghosts of The Mamas and the Papas or The Association, with some excellently unexpected lead guitar work. I need to throw in an Obscure Reference to demonstrate my Encyclopedic Knowledge of Popular Music, so I’ll point out that the the lead guitar that wells up from the nether to open the track is a stylistic dead-ringer to Stephen Stills’ lead in CSN’s “Pre-Road Downs.” You can look it up.

After listening the “Pre-Road Downs” and confirming that I have way too much music crammed into my head, please visit theCatherines’ Bandcamp page and download their entire discography. And be sure to follow theCatherines (who have now graced these virtual pages five times) on Facebook.