Pictoria Vark
Nothing Sticks
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When Victoria Park drops a key change on “Sara,” the opener from her sophomore record as Pictoria Vark, Nothing Sticks, it lifts more than just the song’s tonal center; it raises her standard for songwriting. Even that undersells the effect—when the guitars and trumpets swoop in on the last chorus, they all but lift her off the ground. The Chicago-based bassist and songwriter’s 2022 debut The Parts I Dread established her as a promising new voice in the tradition of late-’90s acts like Cat Power, Helium, or Gaze, but had no flourish so powerful. In raw but effective home-recorded songs, she unpacked the end of her teen years and the beginning of her twenties as her family moved from New Jersey to Wyoming and she struck out on her own in Iowa City. Back then she was “scared of change,” as she sang on “Demarest.” On Nothing Sticks, from that first modulation forward, she wields it like a sword.
The Parts I Dread foreshadowed her vision: in the speed-up, slow-down rhythm of “Wyoming” and the ghostly atmospherics on “Out,” her interest in complex structures and arrangements chafed against the limits of remote, DIY recording. For the follow-up, Park wrote songs with bigger choruses, bolder chord changes, and upgraded settings to match. She made her first trip to a professional studio (Lincoln, Rhode Island’s Big Nice) where she was assisted by engineer/co-producer Bradford Krieger and long-time co-producer and multi-instrumentalist Gavin Caine. She brought in horns, lap-steel guitar, and live strings, all of which deepen her already-rich songwriting with more chromatic feelings. Even as Park sings about drowning those emotions in red, red wine on “I Pushed It Down,” the violin, viola, and cello pull her up and up in the fashion of Wilco’s “Jesus, Etc.” On the sublime, self-doubting “San Diego” (“Winning / Is this…winning?”) the orchestration joins her in somehow-triumphant sadness.
Conceptually, one of Park’s greatest strengths is the double entendre, or the lyric as lenticular print. Her debut album’s title referred to emotional states as well as to points on the map, and likewise, Nothing Sticks reflects on the transitory nature of everything—a blessing, a curse, or just a statement of fact depending on where you stand. Park came to these realizations after an extensive tour supporting her first album, having invested untold hours in something that ultimately just ended. So it is with life, but instead of shying away from the implications, Park embraces them, taking the blessings with the curses and writing her best material in the process. That gives us the particularly lentiform refrain from “We’re Musicians”: “Thank god for good days in bad luck / The times when both are getting fucked.”
