Photo by Ville Juurikkala
A double dose of Metallica is on its way, so get ready!
With what is arguably the biggest tour of the year, the metal monsters will be taking over stadiums with Slipknot on their WorldWired Tour across October. In the final week of September, however, fans will be able to hear their classic songs recreated as haunting instrumental pieces, where heavy metal and classical music collide, at some of the most prestigious venues our country has to offer.
Playing the brand new Fortitude Music Hall in Brisbane, the iconic Sydney Opera House, and Melbourne’s Hamer Hall, Finnish ‘cello metal’ group Apocalyptica, will be celebrating 20 years of the album that brought them global success, Plays Metallica by Four Cellos.
“I just saw Metallica two weeks ago in Helsinki, in Finland, and our show is very different from that,” laughs founding member Eicca Toppinen. “We play the whole first album, the full version of it as the first half of the show – exactly the same way it was recorded back then with the four cellos – and then on the second half of the show our drummer, Mikko [Sirén], joins us and we play more Metallica tunes, so it is a whole night of songs from Metallica this time.
“The first half is more theatrical. It’s more built into the fact that people can really sit down and concentrate and listen and see everything well…The second half is more like a rock show.”
After playing over 170 Plays Metallica by Four Cellos concerts to 40 countries on their debut tour cycle, plus the past two years undertaking this birthday extravaganza, Apocalyptica are well and truly ready to retire the concert series to make way for a new project.
“Originally I thought ‘let’s do 20 to 30 shows to just celebrate the 20 years of the first album’, it’s gotten a little bit out of hand,” laughs Toppinen. “We’ve been doing a lot of those shows over the last two years and we’re already moving into the next album cycle, but we wanted to bring this concert to Australia as well.”
While Apocalyptica are known for their endearing covers and larger-than-life collaborations with prominent metal figures including Ville Valo, Corey Taylor, Adam Gontier and Dave Lombardo, album nine sees the classically trained cellists go back to basics with a self-produced collection of all original instrumental pieces, due for release in January 2020.
“We thought, ‘okay, let’s make this album be artistically one full piece and at the same time, we can work on individual songs with different artists’, and that’s that plan that we are going to have now. We kept it instrumental because it creates a completely, total new world,” Toppinen explains.
“It was like, ‘okay, now let’s do an Apocalyptica album the only way we know how to do an Apocalyptica album’ … It’s really special, it’s an album that I can’t compare to any other album because I don’t think that type of music exists except for on this new album, so it’s very exciting.”
Without the restraints of outside dictators, the four-piece were open to freedom within the creative process, going into the studio without any overarching vision in mind.
“We really didn’t know what was going to happen. We had the music, but we had no proper demos, we have not practiced them together so we went into the studio to work on them together. It was a very different approach. We wanted to go back to the origins of our music and get it to completely the next level and I think we’ve succeeded on that as well.”
See Apocalyptica revisit their origins when Plays Metallica by Four Cellos hits Hamer Hall on Saturday September 28. Tickets via MJR Presents.
