By ADRIAN "Energizer" BROMLEY
REVOLT Music Editor
Forget Metallica’s new album Load and stake out your local record storing looking for this true gem: Apocalyptica. I thought for sure after the last record the four-piece San Fran thrashers would be doing a MTV Unplugged special but I was wrong. Apparently we will be seeing a new Metallica record, supposedly heavier, by Christmas time. Anyway if you are sick of waiting around, let alone listening to Load, listen up. To my surprise, someone actually helped me appreciate Metallica even more now by converting several of the band’s earlier work (‘Creeping Death,’ ‘Welcome Home’ and ‘Master Of Puppets’), as well as newer material such as ‘Sad But True and ‘Enter Sandman’ into beautiful cello arrangements. Amazing. Metallica’s early stuff was meant to be played like this, as the music falls so effortlessly into place with the hard work these four Finnish celloists have done with such classic Metallica numbers. Almost identical to the originals, except with cellos. Want something old with a new twist? By all means check out Apocalyptica.
Four Fabulous Fins
by Johnny Walker (Black)
Rating: Very Good
"Our music is not a joke. We are serious about these songs." --Apocalyptica founder Eicca Toppinen And now for something completely different: the ultimate merger of highbrow and lowbrow, brought to you by a group of seriously twisted Fins. Perhaps it's the fact that Finland experiences an eight-month long winter darkness: sun deprivation like that would put anybody in a metal--or should I say Metallica--frame of mind. Thus say hello to Apocalyptica, four classical-music students (Eicca Toppinen, Max Lilja, Antero Manninen, Paavo Lotjonen) from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland who also just happen to love heavy metal music. While some may, as I did, initially think that an album entitled Apocalyptica Plays Metallica By Four Cellos must be some kind of a satiric put-on, rest assured that this is a completely serious--and very successful--project which at times borders on the revelatory.
As any reader of my review of Lollapalooza 96 in this very publication will know, I don't exactly love Metallica. But Apocalyptica has forced me to re-evaluate their music, if not their rather loathsome personalities, with this album. Divorced from all the macho posturing and phoney nihilistic bluster, Metallica has actually written some impressive stuff, and Apocalyptica does a masterful job at highlighting this fact. Sure, APMBFC is technically impressive, as you'd expect from a group of classical musos, but it is also at times goose-pimple raisingly emotional, a thing of rare beauty.
What works best here are the more intricate numbers from the early days of Metallica. While latter-day Metallica numbers like "Enter Sandman," which leads off the album and "Sad But True" may appeal in the rock format because of their stripped down nature, this works against the metal-classical fusion concept, as they aren't busy enough to really let the boys get going and so, while good, come off more as novelty pieces. But older, more musically ornate Metallica material like "Master of Puppets," "Harvester of Sorrow," and "Creeping Death" proves to be very fertile ground for our Finnish friends, who really get their fingers flying, proving all the while that classical music doesn't have to be the stuffy highbrow anachronism that it all too often is--it's all just a matter of context. Like, this shit rocks, dude.
APMBFC, then, is already a sure-fire bet for this critic's Top Ten list for 1997. After all, what other album could make you see the beauty in the music of a rock band you basically hate, and also turn you on to the possibilites of an entire genre of music which you heretofore thought dead? Apocalyptica bring a sense of reinvention and joyous discovery to a staid and cynical music scene, an enthusiasm for the music itself beyond all the Popmart bullshit and MTV hype we're currently inundated with. This is an album not merely for Metal(lica) fans, or classical fans, but for anyone who views music as something more than just a fashion accessory. Apocalyptica--long may they rock.
