You can hear and see here that Philadelphia-based five-piece Quiet Man — who used to be called God Root — are working to distinguish themselves from the genre pack with their debut album. The way their style is discussed below — the references to dark psychedelia, and so on — I take as a signifier that their aural individuality is a goal in both the now and longer-term. And while that might be true for most bands at least in terms of what they say in press releases, the crusher single “Set to Boil is the New Standard” and their brazenly political stance-taking back up that intention as well.

“Set to Boil is the New Standard” is nine minutes long and one of seven tracks on the record, so either the runtime borders on an hour or they change up their methods significantly throughout. Either way, really. As a first impression from a first record as Quiet Man, the song’s weight is carried through the guitar and bass tones and the overarching atmosphere, a mood of actual-doom (as opposed to doom metal; I’m talking about the end of the world) and the resultant existential angst pervading all the more after reading the descriptions below. I guess they wind up in the post-metal or post-sludge vein, but at least with the single it’s more about the route that gets them there, which is engaging, brutally churning and spacious in kind.

The Starving Lesson is out July 14 through Riff Merchant Records and Astralands. The following came down the PR wire:

QUIET MAN Announces New Album The Starving Lesson

Bringing the darkness back to psychedelia, QUIET MAN (formerly God Root) is anything but quiet. The sludge-infused kaleidoscopic debut album, The Starving Lesson is as political and ecologically bent as it is emotionally and spiritually compelling. “It’s hard to write about anything else when you see what is happening to the planet and to our community,” the band states. The Starving Lesson is due out via Riff Merchant Records and Astralands 7/14.

Today the band has revealed the first single off of the new album. “Set to Boil Is The New Standard”.

Of the track, the band shares: “The military industrial machine is a Frankenstein monster long unchained from any master but total domination and anti-life. It is programmed to feed on the blood of the exploited for meaningless capital to the end-state of annihilation.”

“This isn’t rainbows and sunshine psych, this is peaking on acid in a car accident shit,” the band continues of the album. “We want the music, especially live, to be a more physical sensory experience. I think music has the power to change the physiology of a person and we really strive to give people a psychedelic experience and sense of catharsis through the performance.”

The soundtrack to the self-extinction of man, The Starving Lesson is a stark proclamation of the inevitable end.

The record kicks off with “Pressure to Burrow” The destruction of the self on both the micro and macro levels, the track about watching the people you love falling prey to chaotic drug use, drawing a thematic parallel to the self-destructive ecocide we perpetrate as a species.

“At Operating Temp” is a noise interlude that introduces sounds from numbers stations, encoded and usually automated messages sent to espionage agents over shortwave radio frequencies. These transmissions will outlast all life on Earth.

“From Tomorrow’s Dead Hiss” raises the stakes from simple self-destruction to ecological genocide. “It parallels the dulling and cheapening of human life through the machinations of capitalism to the dulling and cheapening of the Earth and her resources,” the band elaborates.

“The Post Abandoned” uses sounds from shortwave stations including the “dead hand system” meant to trigger nuclear retaliation in the case that there is nobody left alive to “push the button”.

While “The Starving Lesson” is a plea to leave the machine to not participate in its violence.

“All Along We Were Beautiful Radiant Things” is a recontextualization of a very hopeful and inspiring quote from Emma Goldman’s Living My Life: “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.’ Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

The Starving Lesson was recorded by Scot Moriarty at Backroom Studios in Rockaway, NJ and mastered by Magnus Lindberg (CULT OF LUNA).

The beginning of the end, what will take root once we are gone?

QUIET MAN is:

Joe Hughes – Guitar/Vocals
Keith Riecke – Guitar
Jack Sterling – Guitar/Samples
Ross Bradley – Bass/Vocals
Jason Jenigen – Drums

https://www.facebook.com/Quietmanband/
https://www.instagram.com/quietmanband/
https://quietmanband.bandcamp.com/

https://www.riffmerchant.com/
https://www.instagram.com/riffmerchantrecords/
https://riffmerchant.bandcamp.com/

http://facebook.com/astralands
https://www.instagram.com/astralands/
https://astralands.bandcamp.com/

Quiet Man, The Starving Lesson (2023)