Drose

Ohio's trio Drose (vocalist Dustin Rose, guitarist Gregory Packet and drummer John Mengerink) followed up the four-song EP A Voice (2012) with the ten-song album Boy Man Machine (2016), the ultimate "industrial" album because it was conceived and recorded in a factory. They matched Rose's agonizing and psychotic laments with the "laments" of factory machines in songs like An Idol set against sparse post-human soundscapes. The singer's voice and the machine's noise overlap almost perfectly at the beginning of Heat And Patience. Despite its title, The Man is actually one of the most "mechanical", with little or nothing to remind us of humanity. Their music is fundamentally dressing for Rose's theatrical recitation, bordering on mad rambling in A Loss and A Clay Mind. Extreme pain is sandwiched between the percussive tornadoes that open and close A Change, the most unnerving of these recitations. At the same time, Numerical Control and Mechanism Is Lord are odes to the machine in the form of distorted mechanical rhythms and vocal spasms. The former ends with an ear-splitting sawing drone The latter sounds like a jam between the Swans and Sonic Youth. The album ends with the slow, heavy, doom-y elegy His Reflection, the most musical moment until the closing sharp shrill machine drone.