In 2022, the ascendant quasi-hardcore ass-kickers Militarie Gun and the sick one-man fuzz-pop project Dazy joined forces to release a one-off single called "Pressure Cooker." That song is fire. It's probably, without exaggeration, my favorite rock 'n' roll song of the last few years. Today, Militarie Gun and Dazy have once again joined forces, releasing their second full-on collaboration, and it has the frankly very rude title "Tall People Don't Live Long." Might as well be called "Tom, You're About To Die Soon." What the hell, man?
I know both of these guys. That's the fucked up part. (For readers who don't know, the writer of this blog post is seven feet tall.) As soon as I got the advance stream of this track, I had to DM Militarie Gun frontman Ian Shelton like, "Yo, is 'Tall People Don't Live Long' about me?" Ian tells me that it's "for all tall people to project whatever they want on it," which doesn't make me feel better. He's also like, "James is 'tall' by estimation too…" James is James Goodson, otherwise known as Dazy. He's maybe like 6'2". That's normal-people tall. That's tall to a baby. These motherfuckers have it out for me, I just know it.
Anyway, you little short readers don't care about any of this, and that's why I'm about to go stand in front of you at every live performance for the rest of your life. You just want to know if the song is any good. Well, it's really fucking good, which almost makes me more upset. "Tall People Don't Live Long" doesn't sound anything like "Pressure Cooker." It sounds a bit more like the "Pressure Cooker" remix with Mannequin Pussy's Missy Dabice. Ian Shelton and Dazy recorded the track with big-deal producer Justin Raisen, and it's a hazy, breakbeat-driven alt-pop jam.
On tracks like the recent single "Pay No Mind (To The Signs)," Dazy has really been having fun with that sound. It's a bigger departure for Militarie Gun, whose 2024 single "Thought You Were Waving" suggests that they're moving in a brighter, more poppy direction since the release of their first proper album, 2023's Life Under The Gun. Well, these dipshits are good at that, god fucking dammit.
Last week, Militarie Gun's Ian Shelton pulled up on a Dazy show in Brooklyn, and they played "Tall People Don't Live Long" live for the first time. They're lucky I wasn't there. I would've brought a Nerf basketball hoop onstage just to dunk on both of them at the same time. They better flee in terror if they see me coming. I might ball them both up and jam them in an Instant Pot. The pressure cooker's really got them runnin'. Here's what Ian Shelton says about the song in a press release:
James is taller than me, so you can guess how I came up with the title of this song. What started as a joke between us turned into a real conversation about how sometimes people who have reached certain heights in life begin to look down on others. "Tall people" became our tongue-in-cheek term for anyone that’s lost so much perspective that they think it’s alright to make someone feel less-than. This song is about rejecting that attitude—the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
No. Fuck that. I hate it. Here's what James Goodson says:
Ian and I wrote this song shortly after "Pressure Cooker" came out, and it made us realize how daring we could actually be with songwriting. It came together really quickly in an afternoon of us sending ideas back and forth, and I’ll never forget how we couldn’t stop listening to the demo and saying "I can’t believe we wrote this." Years later, we were finally able to get together and take the song over the finish line with Justin Raisen. We see Dazy & Militarie Gun as basically its own band, a separate body of work from our other music with its own identity, and I think this song really solidified that idea for us.
Check out the Shelton-directed "Tall People Don't Live Long" video below.
Look, we know we die early, OK? You're not breaking news over here. At least we get to laugh at you little munchkins while we're here.
