ZOPA - Diamond Vehicle (2025)
By Flork
I first heard about ZOPA earlier this year over lunch with my higher-up from Jablka, although I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with ZOPA’s singer; I just hadn’t known or made any connection to his acting career. My superior raved about the Sopranos (something I never got into since my parents watched it religiously and I thus regarded it as a TV series for a generation I had no care or interest in) and raved more about ZOPA. He explained that the indie rock trio was actually formed by actor Michael Imperioli (think Sopranos and The White Lotus, as well as many others) with bassist/multi-instrumentalist Elijah Amitin and drummer Olmo Tighe. He urged me to give them a listen. And so, when I finally did get around to playing Diamond Vehicle, which was released earlier this year in February, I was somewhat overcome by a wave of nostalgia. What caught my attention was their sound—a band built on an escalating tension, not too strong, but just enough to balance between grit and grace, or heaviness and light. Let’s say that a desperate, yet honest tenderness came to my mind. And though ZOPA is known for their vintage sound, which is steeped in the 1970s New York lineage of Television, the Velvet Underground (you might compare Michael Imperioli’s singing to Lou Reed, but I won’t), even the Ramones and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, ZOPA made their debut with La Dolce Vita in 2020, although the band has been around since 2006. Their name, meaning „Patience” in Tibetan and part of Imperioli’s Buddhist name, speaks to the band’s meditative undercurrent. Yet beneath the spirituality is something rawer, even haunting, which could be compared in a way to Imperioli’s other great role: Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos. Christopher was a character plagued by addiction and self-doubt, but also a dreamer desperate for redemption. ZOPA’s music inhabits a similar paradox—taut, jagged, full of noise, but threaded with yearning, as well as that honest tenderness I mentioned previously, desperately searching for light.
The album’s opener A Still Life embodies that tension immediately: a spacious, shoegaze-tinged tune that is sprinkled with a spectral beauty by backing vocals a bit like Jane Siberry, and which become a presence across each of the seven tracks. These harmonies are crucial—they soften the edges, add depth, and make the music feel communal rather than insular. You become aware that the production uses analogue technology as if the album might have been recorded at Abbey Road. There are no moments of overdubbing with multiple layers of sounds, just pure rock and roll the way it was once played.
Love and Other Forms of Violence crashes between hushed verses and walls of distortion, invoking compassion amid chaos. That escalating tension is always there, like rising flood waters that never breach the levees. Red Sky swaggeringly pulses with Amitin’s bass, and is inspiring in its essence, with hopeful and complimenting lyrics (you’re not like anyone else....you call my name and guide me to the next life...).
Other tracks, such as Withdrawal and Ocean/Heroin snarl with punk urgency, echoing the kind of restless hunger that Christopher himself carried. These are the Velvet Underground comparisons I mentioned earlier, but they are more homages to the times as opposed to plain covers. It is here where ZOPA cleverly channels the ghosts of New York past. And like I said before, even in its roughest moments, ZOPA’s music leaves space for tenderness, like taking a deeper looks into one‘s conscience or memory, whispering reminders of something purer underneath the noise.
Diamond Vehicle ends with The Arrows of Outrageous Fortune, which might be the band’s most ambitious piece, since it‘s ten minutes of grief and catharsis, written for a friend lost to suicide. Its shifting movements mirror the album’s themes of suffering and survival, and certainly transcendence, leaving listeners in a state that is both drained and uplifted.
And the Flork’s prognosis? Diamond Vehicle is a an album for those who are nostalgic for those times when a band could make a seedy dive bar feel like a cozy living room, filled with good friends and company. I really like the background vocals, since they create a spectral counterpoint that enlarges the music beyond the trio itself. In fact, you rarely hear rock music sung this way anymore. And though it might seem that the New York sound has softened a bit over the years, ZOPA proves that New York rock is still alive and kicking—always streetwise and cutting, but this time with patience, compassion, and peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment