Pictoria Vark is the spoonerism alias of the young singer-songwriter Victoria Park, who turned heads with her 2022 debut album The Parts I Dread. She aims even higher on her excellent Nothing Sticks — it’s the perfect springtime road-trip indie-rock album you didn’t realize you deserved, full of soft-spoken guitar haze and emotional travelogues. The album unfolds like the journal of a wandering young heart who rambles from town to town, from feeling to feeling, but without feeling connected anywhere. As she sings in the witty “San Diego,” “I’m wherever I go.”
Vark grew up in New Jersey as a suburban emo kid, picking up the bass because she got obsessed with Carol Kaye’s playing on the Beach Boys’ classic Pet Sounds. She still writes her songs on bass, giving them a spacious, reflective tone. She crafted her own bedroom-pop style, sounding at first like a shy wallflower learning to speak up. But she’s full of sly wit and matter-of-fact candor. She goes deep into 20-something ennui with “I Sing What I See,” confessing, “I put my money on the wrong things/Ambulances and my broken strings/Or a thought that’s stupidly clinging.” (Join the club.)
Most of these songs take place in the indie-rock milieu, where your home is whatever floor you’re crashing on tonight, your friends are the blank faces you see staring at the gig, and your past is whatever hungover memories you manage to hold on to. In “I Pushed It Down,” Vark laments “trying to make it in those bands, waiting for someone to understand.”
The conceit works brilliantly in gems like “We’re Musicians” (“we’re not actors”) and “Other Things,” where she uses the indie-rock hustle as her metaphor for romantic struggles. As she sings, “Every verse becomes a chorus/With each subsequent performance/I know you like I know the routine/I miss you most when you’re next to me.” She makes the day-to-day chaos of playing in the band sound like the mirror image for anybody’s youthful upheavals, in the great tradition of the Replacements’ “Left of the Dial,” the White Stripes’ “Little Room,” or Spoon’s “Small Stakes.”
After doing her first album in pandemic isolation, this time Vark went into a real studio, co-producing with her trusty collaborators Bradford Krieger and Gavin Caine. She stretches out on guitar for “Other Things” and “San Diego,” along with her usual bass. The fantastic “Lucky Superstar” is full of shoegaze guitar, with a Smashing Pumpkins-style sense of rock grandeur, as she sings about taking aim at somebody’s armored heart, with sly lines like “I could never hurt you/Unless I really tried.” “San Diego” could be her indie answer to Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues,” except instead of “I cried when I wrote this song,” she tops it with “I blacked out singing this.”
As the title suggests, Nothing Sticks is full of songs where she faces up to how transient youth is, chasing moments of romance or inspiration that get her hopes up for a minute or two, then fizzle out. But obviously, these days, that’s a feeling that isn’t exclusive to just callow indie kids. As she sings bluntly in “We’re Musicians,” “Thank god for good days in bad luck/The times when both are getting fucked.” In these songs, you can hear her wonder if she’ll ever find her places to belong, or whether she’s just kidding herself. But when the songs are this great, Vark makes you hope she keeps on searching — and turns all her heartache into an adventure worth joining.
