Across All Roads Lead To The Gun (Deluxe), out now from Loma Vista Recordings, the California punk group Militarie Gun sound relentlessly exuberant, delivering the vigorous sound of swinging by one arm from a ledge and shouting into the wind, the pouring rain, a crowd of otherwise lethargic bystanders, or a surreal creation imagined by a troubled mind.
Whatever it is, it’s freedom. You can dance on top of a moving train, or you can start a circle pit in your living room with your dog. In 2023, Militarie Gun are probably catapulting to a city near you, considering the group’s relentless touring schedule and frontman Ian Shelton’s dedication to it.
The music of Militarie Gun proves very direct—and catchy. Although the rhythms work the album into a frenzy, it’s also freewheeling, finding what feels like some hopeful spot in what could otherwise be just a cloud of stagnant nihilism steaming off the world’s tensions. Instrumentally, lyrically, and vocally, you get the sense you’re listening to those in the group express themselves in real time, and on the new album Militarie Gun are prepping for 2023, Shelton indicates that’ll continue. In both instrumentals and lyrics, he writes without much later editing, so it captures a moment and spins that on repeat with such an intensity bystanders easily fall in.
The deluxe record Shelton—with a group now including Nick Cogan and William Acuña on guitar, Vince Nguyen on drums, and Max Epstein on bass—released this October includes two previous EPs from Militarie Gun and four new songs, three of which are collabs. Although the track “I Can’t Stand Busy People,” on which Woolworm joins, veers into more relaxed but still passionate rock rhythms, it tracks closely with the rest. The group’s music staggers, pulses, and jumps—and they stick throughout to an approach hinging on hooks that makes it all personable, even if also confrontational. That’s a central component—singing, or yelling, along (or at least the opportunity for it).
The melody and grit really stick. If you like passionate but scouring heavy music like what Spice release, you might be into this. Below, check out what Shelton has to say about some of what Militarie Gun have been doing recently and what’ll be arriving soon.
How has it been for your recent material to connect with people? Have a lot of folks really latched on to some of that newer stuff you guys have put out?
It’s hard to tell because we haven’t—because they were all collaboration songs, we weren’t able to play them live, and I feel like that’s the main way you can really tell if a song is working. Specifically, “Can’t Get None” and “I Can’t Stand Busy People” we’ll get talked to about a bit, but without that feedback loop of physically seeing people sing along or whatever, you kind of have no real clue how it’s connecting or not connecting. We had songs from our original material where we were obsessed with the songs. We played it live, and it was like a dud, and you’re like, “Oh, OK.” So I guess it didn’t connect with people the way I thought. We just don’t have really the feedback loop to really know currently at least.
I’ve got to learn to sing those songs so that way we can do them live with just me singing, but then I’d have to do a weird, dual voice thing. I feel like that’d be kind of corny. […] Maybe one of our guitar players will do the entire song, and then I just sing the one small part—It’d be pretty funny.
When you’re writing your own material, is the personal expressiveness of the songs something to which you really latch on?
I would say it’s just a completely intuitive process. It’s more so about not thinking about anything and letting what is naturally occurring occur and just not getting in the way of what wants to happen, more or less. A lot of it is just me in the practice space by myself creating a song on my iPhone, and then at the end, I’m like, OK, cool. Well that’s just the song now. We don’t ever revise really or anything like that. It’s all kind of first draft. And I think that emotional connection comes from it just being somewhat of just a pure intention. Like, there’s no posturing in it; there’s no thinking it has to be one way or another. This is the document of what happened one day at the practice space, basically.
[…] The emotional tone of it is informed by whatever the instrumental brings up for me to then write about because I also will come in with no lyrics written. Once I hear the instrumental, I kind of say the first bullshit that comes to my mind, and then that ends up being the throughline for the song. Whatever the instrumental brings up is what the song will then be.
Do you think that as time goes on, the process of mentally getting somewhere in which that kind of songwriting can happen gets easier?
Well, now there are all these roadblocks of being busy, which is a very interesting, new dilemma from the original time that the band was started. Because now it’s like there’s things in the way of (it). Now, we have to be on tour all the time, and there’s less time to focus on songs and songwriting. Luckily, we stockpiled a very large amount of material, so it’s not like we’re going to run out of anything anytime soon. The process doesn’t change. Now, it’s just finding the time to fit the process in whenever we can.
Do you ever get tired of being on the road so much?
It’s my preference to do it a lot. I really like doing specifically six-week tours, because by the end you’re drastically better at being a band than at the beginning. It also is kind of like a trial by fire as far as personal relationships to everybody in the band. But, I think you can really see what’s working and what’s not over a long period of time. After this last five-week tour, I felt like, oh, I finally learned to sing. That was my takeaway after however many tours we’ve done. This one, I was like, oh, I figured out something new, and I think we figured out how to be a better band. So that’s kind of my preference is just to do it for a long period of time. And I mean, as far as the financial component of being a band, really the best way to ever even be able to make any money at all is to do the most dates you can to dig out of the debt hole that you create just by starting a tour. So the goal is to just do as much as humanly possible to try to get out of it as much as we can.
[…] I mean, I had this crazy illness on this tour, and I was like, alright, how do I sing and be a good frontman while being sick for, like, three weeks straight? And by the end, I was like, you know, I think I figured it out. So next time I get sick, hopefully I got the shorthand to not suck.
Are there particular locales where you feel like you’ve really gotten the best reception playing live?
I feel like New York is a total cop-out because it’s also like L.A. and New York are the two biggest markets. Obviously, your shows there, unless you are not doing too hot, are probably going to be pretty good. But Denver and Chicago hands down are the two best cities as far as reception and energy. We just go there, and the shows are incredible, and they seemed to be on board with us early in both places. On our first full U.S. tour, we played Chicago twice because we did it on our own show, and it was a really small room, and it sold out, and it was really fun. And then Fiddlehead asked us to come back on an off day on our tour, and so we just drove back to Chicago in the middle of this tour and played there again at a bigger show with them. We came back with Touche Amore. We’ve had such an awesome time building up everything in Chicago and going there as much as possible. I think we’ve played there just as many times as we’ve played L.A., so my favorite city to play probably is Chicago and then Denver, 100%.
Are there places where you haven’t performed much or at all with Militarie Gun but would like to head in the future?
Every time we announce shows, the comments are blown up with: “Really, no Texas,” “No Florida,” and we just haven’t had the chance to go there. We did The Fest in Gainesville, but we have yet to be able to, like, go to Miami and do our own proper Florida shows. So that’s top of the list. We’ve been just unable to do it, and I’m trying to do it ASAP. So that, and then Texas we’ve played before, but it was, like, our very first tour, and we’re dying to get back. But it’s just been hard to schedule because every tour that we get offered doesn’t seem to go to either, and then we—it’s hard to make your way out to the fuckin’ other edge of the country.
[…] To go to Miami, you have to go all the way down and then all the way back up. I’m from the Northwest, and it’s the same thing where it’s 12 to 14 hours in, 12 to 14 hours out, and there’s no promise the shows are going to be that great, so why would you not skip it, you know?
So going forward, are there instrumental or lyrical themes you’re angling to explore on the new record Militarie Gun will have coming?
I mean, again, it’s the type of thing where I really don’t have a lot of intention going into a song. And so a theme really only emerges after I’ve created. Like, at the end of demoing all of the upcoming album, I was like, oh, now there’s, like, a theme that is apparent to me that I clearly am stuck on, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I wasn’t going into it trying to be like, “And then this song needs to speak to this.” Instead, after all of the songs are created, I was like, oh, this is the thing I clearly was trying to get over or whatever through all of these songs. I don’t know if I would like to put any of that out into this just because it’s kind of so far removed from when the songs will be released, so it’s not quite the right time to explore those things. I don’t know the theme of the record or whatever is bothering me until I get through so many songs and realize they’re more or less about the same topic from different angles.
[…] The next stuff is tenfold more catchy.
Are there things in the broader hardcore and hardcore-adjacent community that you’d like to see going forward into next year?
I would love to see more weirdness and creativity in hardcore and punk. I think that we’re seeing a lot of that naturally right now. I think MSPAINT is going to be one of the biggest bands out very soon. And with that, I think that we’re just kind of shaking the chains off of hyper-traditional, kind of pre-written music. And so I think the more that we go towards creativity in songwriting versus what was kind of happening for a long time, where these really canned—hardcore was, like, just the same tropes repackaged, which is obviously still happening largely, but I think that more and more over time, we’re seeing it get more creative, and I think that hopefully, that’s just the new wave. Hopefully the new wave is that every band sounds different, and there’s not really any one distinct sound, and it’s more so about bands playing together despite not sounding similar.
[…] I mean, not to harp on MSPAINT, but they’re a band that, like, their inspirations are anime, video games, and drum ‘n’ bass, and somehow that turns into a punk band. I would love to see less things where it’s like, “I’m just trying to do this version of that band.” I would love to see the list of random influences grow.
Photo courtesy of Militarie Gun
