PICASTRO - Metal Cares

Folk instrumentation, blues soul: Picastro are the latest offshoot of the Canadian scene, and "Metal Cares" represents Liz Hysen's personal ordeal in eleven suicide songs.

They move between post-rock and slowcore, between fellow countrymen A Silver Mt.Zion and Low, with music that's decidedly singer-songwriter in nature - not so much in the final result as in the intention behind it. Strings, guitars, slow rhythms, but the sound slips by without Hysen paying it much mind, focused above all on making her inner ghosts palpable, with a vocal style that follows in the wake of the great depressive songwriters of recent years.

We could mention Shannon Wright, Thalia Zedek, and the latest offshoot Vajagic, for the bleeding monotony of the delivery, for the obsessive intensity with which the voice stands as protagonist over the rest of the arrangements.

There's no consoling intent, nor any wish for self-pity, in Picastro's music - only pain, which becomes unbearable when the band decides to bring the languid drift of the sound to emotional fruition.

Peaks of suffering in refrains as simple as the lament of "Common Cold", with piano tolling darkly into a pneumatic void, or in the pop torment of "Sharks", an instantly gripping melody over a mantra-like carpet of guitars and strings.

"Metal Cares" never grows tiresome, partly because the songs are crafted with real skill; they avoid needless sprawl, and the arrangements, though elaborate, never weigh down the structure.

The band manages to perfectly support Hysen's delivery by building leaden, at times oppressive atmospheres, as in "I Can't Fall Asleep", a martial gait in the vein of Pedro The Lion, caged within a flowery weave of violas, violins and who knows what else.

And then there's the languid poetry of "Raddy Daddy", the acoustic/electric symbiosis of "Skinnies"... lovingly distant from the greyness of everyday life; yes, because Hysen's depressive cathedrals seem to embody the quintessence of the North American sub-cultural humus, of metropolitan areas that feel like the provinces, where the rejection of modernity is an instinct for preserving an ancestral purity.

So far from us.

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30/04/2026