PopLib featured The Catenary Wires‘ “Mirrorball” from a 7″ single recently. Here’s another new song, this time from their forthcoming album “Birling Gap” due in June. The Catenary Wires feature Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey, once of Heavenly and Talulah Gosh. They are still crafting melodic pop songs with complex messages, as “The Overview Effect” shows:

They explain: “The overview effect is the feeling astronauts describe when they see the Earth from a huge distance.” With that effect comes the realisation how small and fragile the planet is.

The song is quietly gorgeous, Amelia Fletcher’s vocals floating on top of an repeating acoustic guitar melody and, behind that a gentle smudge of shoegaze ambience from the infinite space reverb wash of fuzzy electric guitar.  

They describe it as one of the album’s “anxious love songs, set in a fragile world.”  The fast-eroding white chalk cliffs at Birling Gap near Eastbourne on the southern coast of Britain, which give the album its name, represent impermanence, erosion and environmental change, reflected in the song’s anxious refrain “can’t things stay the same?“

Birling Gap is released in the UK on Skep Wax Records on Friday 18th June 2021. It is available for pre-order via good record stores and The Catenary Wires Bandcamp. It is also available in the US on Shelflife Records. If you are in NZ/ Australia and keen to get the LP, postage from the UK is much more reasonable than from the US.