By Genre: Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Sara,” “Lucky Superstar,” “Other Things”
On her lush sophomore album, Chicago artist Pictoria Vark (neè Victoria Park) steps up production on her new album to create a bold and dynamic collection of songs. If her debut, THE PARTS I DREAD, was born out of isolation during lockdown, NOTHING STICKS shows growth within her already unique, bass-centric songwriting.
I always wanted to learn the bass. My uncle played bass in a band, and I idolized his Gen X slacker vibe. They practiced in the basement of my grandparents’ house, and sometimes, I’d sneak downstairs to try to figure out how to play the bass. I remember there was just one day it clicked, and I realized you could make the bass sound different by pressing the spaces between the little barriers. I’d plink and pluck away at the strings, moving my fingers from one random place to another, hoping I might accidentally play a song. That same day, I strummed too hard and broke a string. I was horrified. I thought I royally fucked up, and I would now owe my uncle an obscene amount of money because instruments are precious, and I imagined strings were very expensive to replace.
I’m usually a proponent of listening to music on headphones. I often enjoy most music when wholly isolated, so that I may give it my full attention with minimal distractions. This is the first time I will strongly insist a record be played out from speakers. NOTHING STICKS deserves to take up space and have room to breathe—whether you have a high-end stereo, a soundbar, or a Bluetooth speaker, Pictoria Vark’s songs need to fill a room to let you appreciate them as a whole.
When the retail chain Service Merchandise closed down in the 2000s, I found a bass guitar in the middle of the store. It was a floor model, marked down cheap because it was missing a string and the fancy knobs that control the volume and whatever the other knob controls. (I wanna say “tone”?) It was shiny and black, with a weird-looking letter E on its headstock, which I would later learn stood for “Epiphone.” I wanted to thump its strings and really learn how to play. Once we got it home, I couldn’t figure out what to do with the damn thing.
Vark’s songs have a rhythmic quality attributed to them initially being written on the bass—a fact that made me appreciate each song’s composition all the more. Dynamic sounds like the flutter of horns on “Sara,” the reverse loop beat on “No One Left,” and the delicate piano and strings of “I Sing What I See” help make a wall of sound reminiscent of ‘90s indie rockers that dog, The Rentals, and Superchunk.
The first bass player I ever met (that I wasn’t related to) was a wavy-haired punk rocker named Adam. He was a severely cool jerk with whom I struck up a friendship solely so I could convince him to start a band with me. I knew a drummer already, and after I introduced the two, they went on to be in many bands together without me. While Vark sings what she sees, I write what I hear. NOTHING STICKS brought me a wave of memories and those fleeting moments from my youth when the only thing I wanted was to be surrounded by the mystery that was music.
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