Audio By Carbonatix
Long-distance relationships suck. Without a constant stream of casual intimacy, the lines strung between lovers start to short-circuit and fray. Phone calls sound forced. E-mails read like laundry lists of halfhearted flirtations. All those Xs and Os begin to cancel each other out. Other people — those who you can actually touch and smell and get wasted with — start to look a whole lot hotter. Absence makes the heart grow fainter, not fonder.
Drummer Cullen Hendrix can attest to that. He’s been in a long-distance relationship for over a year now, one that has stretched from halfway across the country to halfway around the world. But this isn’t some cheap fling with a girl he met at Niagara Falls; it’s with a tightly wound post-punk band called the North Atlantic. And his paramours? Jason Richards, a would-be marine archeologist who plays bass and stands taller than a street lamp, and a mustachioed, mulleted singer/guitarist named Jason Hendrix — Cullen’s little brother. And while the strains of space and separation have definitely weighed on the threesome, it’s made the North Atlantic’s music — not to mention its ties of fraternity and friendship — even stronger.
“The interview is going to have to be with just me,” Cullen explains. “But that should be okay. I can talk enough shit for the three of us.” Getting all the members of the North Atlantic in one room together is a nearly impossible feat these days; Cullen and Richards currently call San Diego home, while the younger Hendrix lives in Illinois, where he’s a student at the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. And as if that wasn’t scattershot enough, Cullen studied in Norway all last summer, effectively spreading the band across two continents and more than five thousand miles — split, coincidentally enough, by its geographical namesake.
“I got this fellowship to go out to Norway and work on my dissertation,” says Cullen, who’s wrapping up his Ph.D. in political science. “I wrote papers on the effects of terrain and geography on civil conflict. When you inhabit a country that has really rough terrain, like mountains or rain forests or deserts, you’re less likely to be economically developed or to have strong political institutions. All of these factors make you much more likely to experience civil war.”
It’s no wonder Cullen wound up being so immersed in the idea of internecine tension. When he was eight and his brother six, their parents divorced. As traumatic an experience as that is for little kids, it drew the brothers even closer — that is, until high school. That was when their father moved from California to Michigan, and the Hendrix siblings made the toughest decision of their young lives.
“My brother and I decided to go to high school in different places,” he explains. “I went with my dad to Michigan, and Jason stayed in Fresno. We’re very similar in a lot of ways, and I think both of us were interested in figuring out what kind of people we would be minus the other. Like a lot of kids who deal with their parents splitting up, we felt a lot of misplaced hostility. So we had scrapes with each other, and we weren’t as close as I would have liked. If we had grown up together during that really formative high school period, it’s likely that we would have developed our personalities in opposition to each other, rather than in a complementary fashion.”
“Even back then, though, Jason was turning me on to new music,” he confesses. “I’ll admit it. My little brother’s cooler than me.”
The two didn’t wind up rocking together until 1998, when an old outfit of Jason’s called I, Astronaut was suddenly left with a vacancy behind the drum kit. Offers from several record labels were floating around, so Jason called up the first drummer who popped into his head — his brother. But even then, distance was a factor: At the time, Cullen was attending college in Mexico.
“I dropped out the University of Mexico City and broke up with my girlfriend, and within two weeks I was back in California,” Cullen recalls with a laugh. “When I got out there, we played one show, and the band broke up. I went into a pretty hard bender after that. I felt like I had lost my own identity, given up everything that really defined me as a person at that point.”
Still, the bonds of family were enough to pull him through. A year later, Cullen and Jason moved to Michigan to enroll in Kalamazoo College together. They met Richards soon after, and the North Atlantic began taking shape. After a couple of destabilizing lineup changes and a move back to San Diego, the band released its debut, Buried Under Tundra, in 2002. It’s a frigid reflection of estrangement and isolation, ventilated here and there with bits of zigzag rhythm and piercing melody. But 2003’s followup, Wires in the Walls, remains the North Atlantic’s definitive statement. Shedding introspection in favor of a chaotic yet cerebral rage, the group slashes away at images of urban alienation, the hidden agenda of technocracy and, of course, torpedoed romance. The sound is stark yet arrestingly lush, a staggering hybrid of Archers of Loaf, Hot Snakes and Dismemberment Plan, its jagged edges eroded by echoing ambience and the occasional anthem-sized couplet.
Jason’s lyrics, in fact, hint at all the emotional turmoil of his family’s history. He directly addresses his mother and father in “Atmosphere Vs. the Dogs of Dawn,” and he speaks of his on-off relationship with Cullen in “The Bottom of This Town”: “We can’t trust each other/ Progress our only lover/These streets have no cover/Hey brother, where have you been?” As revelatory as these lines seem, however, Cullen downplays their psychoanalytic significance.
“My brother’s a big Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young fan,” he notes, “and part of the reason is that they could convey extremely human and personal ideas through characters in their songs. They step back from them and give them distance and perspective. I mean, regardless of what he’s singing, Jason was never a bombardier in the war, you know? A lot of his lyrics are his heart on his sleeve, but a lot of them are also his heart kind of under his sleeve.
“Wires in the Walls is actually a really political record in a lot of ways,” Cullen observes. “There’s a lot of questioning whether or not the world we live in and its exaltation of technology is really the best direction for humanity. Which is odd, because we’re a band that uses a lot of studio trickery and effects. Maybe it’s kind of meta-criticism, throwing their technology back at them. People beat their plows into swords; I guess we beat them into big muffs and delay pedals.”
Not to mention spare tires and odometer needles. Hitting the road has been a central aspect of the North Atlantic since its inception, even more so than for many other, larger, acts. As Cullen tells it, “Touring is a big part of our band. That’s sometimes the only way to spend quality time with people, when you’re in the van on a long drive with nothing else going on but the three of you catching up. A lot of the most honest conversations I’ve ever had with Jason have been during those three-in-the-morning-till-eight-in-the-morning drives from Ogden, Utah, to Spokane, Washington. The summer that I left for Norway was sort of a landmark with our band. That was the first summer since we’ve been in San Diego that we haven’t gone on tour. It was difficult for us all to make that decision.”
But amid all the sporadic activity over the last year and half since Jason left for Chicago, the North Atlantic has managed to maintain its hyperkinetic intensity during live performances. The trio’s first reunion show in San Diego in January of 2004 was an unforeseen smash — despite the handicap of separation. “That was kind of a big moment for us,” Cullen remembers. “It was a packed house, and we were all just so amped on adrenaline from not having been on stage for a while. The outpouring of love and respect that we got from people who came was just insane.
“That show was the acid test,” he continues. “We needed to see whether we were going to just look at our past and relive things that we had already done, or whether we were going to make a concerted effort to be a living, breathing entity with a future.”
Indeed, the future looks pretty good for the North Atlantic. Currently on tour and planning a new record — which Cullen predicts will offer more “pretty melody” as well as more “crazy, fucked-up noise” — the players have also been busy writing music on the side. Not that Cullen has looked upon such extracurricular activity without a twinge of envy. “Jason has been playing with people in Chicago, and I’ve been out there and met all his new bandmates,” he says. “I’ll admit to a little bit of jealousy. The idea of him playing with another drummer… I’m not territorial about it, but he’s my little brother, you know?”
Regardless of the temptation of new projects, though, Cullen wants it made perfectly clear that the tide of the North Atlantic — intermittent as it may be — is nonetheless inexorable. “When there’s a basic assumption that you’re on indefinite hiatus, things tend to fizzle,” he notes. “You need to know that there’s some potential for growth. But as long as you realize there’s something you’re all shooting for together, you can make distance work.”
