Bruised confessionals: Militarie Gun’s cathartic road to ‘God Save the Gun’
For their much-awaited sophomore LP, Los Angeles’ Militarie Gun steps into a deeper realm of bruised catharsis.
Such a wounded confession is starkly illustrated on the cover of God Save the Gun, out on Loma Vista Recordings. Arms held aloft amid a divine communiqué with a high power, be it the cleansing power of music or the vanquished demons in his private life, frontman Ian Shelton stands with a battered and weathered ache, offering thematic clues to Militarie Gun’s preceding fraught, spiritual path.
God Save the Gun serves as an anthemic hardcore means to confront one’s lapses into the dark, while also peering into just where such troubles are sparked, a personal probing unveiled on the album’s lead single, ‘B A D I D E A’.
“So much of the album is the seeking of external validation from bad places…” Shelton tells Far Out in the run-up to God Save the Gun’s drop. “You know, seeking that through drugs and alcohol and being in turbulent situations, and ‘Throw Me Away’ is that in terms of love in a way that, you know, might be toxic or unsuitable…it’s just like needing something else so desperately but not being able to acquire it.”
Describing the new album as inhabiting two conceptual halves, Shelton identifies a redemptive arc that such frank examinations of destructive lifestyles stridently march towards. “It kind of results in the fallout of the depression that comes with all of that, with the depression that comes with drug and alcohol use,” he reveals. “And then it is meant to kind of emerge from that low point and go into ‘Isaac’s Song’ and ‘Thought You Were Waving’ with the desire to step out of yourself and not only realise that you’re struggling but realise that the people around you are struggling and then hopefully on the other side of it come to the conclusion that you can move forward in your life and make different decisions.”
While 2023’s Life Under the Gun leaned more toward a cocksure and looser approach to their stirring West Coast punk attack, Shelton’s unwavering lyrical commitment to healing has guided Militarie Gun toward a sharper focus on God Save the Gun’s suite of songs, cutting as many as six extra cuts from the sessions but keeping them aside to ensure narrative anchor. Shelton clearly points out, however, that such personal underpinning is no moralistic bludgeon.
“It’s meant to kind of lay the pieces out and see what fits into your own life, and if that fits, you might understand it to be a problem, or you might understand the ways in which it’s also toxic to you…it’s never meant to be instructive in that way,” Shelton adds.
Further lyrical opening up has also yielded a more creatively collaborative record. Whereas Shelton’s demos for Life Under the Gun would translate to the finished studio version largely in the same form, for God Save the Gun, all respective band members had gelled with extra synergy since, and greater rehearsal time meant that everybody’s fingerprints helped elevate the new material. Shelton, too, reels off the wider team that helped lift off the new record with fervent magnanimity.
“Riley McIntyre, who produced the album with me, our friend David Kelling, Philip Odom, who’s been a constant collaborator throughout the history of Militarie Gun,” he says with praise. “Nick [Panella] from MSPaint helped us with ‘God Owes Me Money’. James [Goodson] from Dazy…he helped us with ‘Kick’ and ‘Fill Me With Paint’…they wouldn’t be the songs that they are without those people.”
Such an emboldened force has been channelled to the stage, Militarie Gun touring steadily across their native USA as well as around Europe and Australia over the last year or so, with God Save the Gun’s numbers sparking just as much a crowd frenzy as their established repertoire, ‘B A D I D E A’ especially going down a storm as their typical live finale. “It’s getting as crazy, or crazier, a reaction to ‘Do It Faster’ which I would assume most people thought that we couldn’t ever top as it was our big song from our last album,” Shelton gleefully reports. “But it seems like, already, people are there for it and it feels amazing that it’s recognised…”
Shelton’s not a man to rest on his laurels, however. Buoyed by recent live reception and buzz surrounding God Save the Gun, the extra time afforded to Militarie Gun’s second album sessions has brought a sharper songcraft, wider palette of influence, and a further strive for perfection, according to their frontman, and with it a high standard he has no intentions of dropping.
“I’m embracing the idea that, who knows, maybe it’ll be five years before we release another record,” Sheldon confesses frankly. “If that’s what it takes, maybe we’ll never release another record again. I don’t know. It has to be better. We have to go in at least thinking ourselves that this is better than anything we’ve ever made before. So, whatever amount of time it takes to arrive at feeling that way is what it’ll take. And before, I was very much just like write as many songs as I can, get in the studio as soon as possible. And now I think I’m against that approach”.
Such open possibilities for Militarie Gun only fuel their burning essentiality, fired up with the ephemerality of a band not knowing what awaits the corner. With such a chartered course behind them, each album and significant EP exploring life’s fatalistic pangs and the occasional trappings of inevitability, God Save the Gun’s salvation could lead to a conclusive chapter in the Militarie Gun story, or a new era of renewed power.
“I’m not telling you what to do,” Shelton asserts. “I am just trying to lay out what I feel I had to do and what I went through, and people can arrive at their own conclusions off of receiving all that information”. Whatever awaits, God Save the Gun seems to broadcast confidently that this is likely just the beginning.
