Send "Picastro " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Bend over, 'cause life's shortAmazon Lala Some artists get a little slack as time passes, losing whatever fierceness made them compelling in the first place. That intensity isn’t the only way to make good art, but it is one of the main ones, and it can be hard to keep up. Not because people love selling out, but because time passes and whatever’s driving you dies down a little, or you get bored, or you get complacent. But sometimes you get the opposite. Some artists just keep refining themselves over time, honing themselves to a keen edge, cutting back anything that’s non-essential, and the result is a voice that gets more distinct and more intense as they keep working, not less. One way you can tell that Picastro’s Liz Hysen is the second kind of artist is that Become Secret is her most inviting, even catchiest work to date at the same time that it’s her darkest, most unsettling album. Working again with drummer Brandon Valdivia and cellists Stephanie Vittas and Nick Storring, here Hysen has moved away from the Dirty Three atmospherics of Red Your Blues, the clean folk band sprawl of Metal Cares, and the haunted phantasmagoria of Whore Luck (their ‘rock’ album, I suppose, and the Toronto band’s finest effort before this one), and towards the closest thing she’s yet done to a solo album. Themes include the torments of St. Anthony, dying in the desert, love curdling to something worse than hate, Antonioni’s The Passenger and, to quote one of the best lines I’ve ever read in an album promo, “the collapse of everything you know”. These are songs about the desire to escape from the burdens of life and the futility of that attempt whether you’re wandering through the desert, impersonating someone else, or just hiding in your room....full text |
| Allmusic |
| Picastro's fourth album finds Liz Hysen and her bandmates again tackling preconceptions of what a rock band is supposed to be -- calling Become Secret a chamber pop album isn't really accurate, but it's hard to hear it as anything but an exploration in the tension between Hysen's compelling vocals and the varied instrumentation throughout. The slocore tag Picastro received early on in some corners has a vague relevance, but on a song like "Pig & Sucker," the sense of compelling, unsettled strangeness is much greater than most bands could pull off. Even with a straightforward-enough lyric and performance, the quality of Hysen's singing and the tactile feeling of the guitar suggest the unearthly feeling of Charalambides far more than a confessional rock song. The simultaneously jaunty and melancholy piano on the opening "Twilight Parting" sets the tone for the album, a sense of extremities constantly working against each other. It can be heard in the tape hiss and found-sound clatter at the end of "A Dune a Doom," the foghorn drone squalls underpinning the arrangement of "Neva," and the powerful, strange singing and piano on "A Neck in the Desert." "Suttee," with its titular reference to the practice of widows perishing at the funerals of their husbands, shows that this sense of pushing the limits isn't restricted to the music -- it's a live-in-the-studio stompalong, but when the vocals sing "You will never love again," the finality suggested is hardly comforting....full text |
| Nme |
| We’ve got the apocalypse all wrong. There’ll be no devastation or nomadic hordes of men gnawing babies’ toes. Instead humanity will peter out with a whimper. In the final days, small pockets will remain, and their final laments of our history will sound something like Picastro. Haunting mantras ‘Split Head’ and ‘A Dune A Doom’ are all mournful chanting piano that rumbles on the edge of a tune, broad brushstrokes of cello and guitar plucked with the weariness of imminent doom, sung by the deathly Liz Hysen, her vocals an unholy wedding of hippy nihilism and goth. End-time celebrating religious nutbars won’t be finding much eternal hope here, but for everyone else, a perfect soundtrack to the approaching void....full text |
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