Concert Review: Apocalyptica mesmerizes Moore Theatre crowd

Last Friday, the Moore Theatre was in for a special evening with the cello metal band Apocalyptica, who last year released a remastered version of Plays Metallica by Four Cellos, to celebrate 20 years from the original release back in 1996. Their tour was completely focused on that as they played nothing but Metallica songs. Apart from doing a phenomenal job playing Metallica on cellos, they have released six albums with original compositions and have sold over four million albums globally.

The room fell silent around eight as the band walked to the front of the stage and sat on four boxes, starting off with “Enter Sandman,” and “Master of Puppets.” Their lighting was minimal but still looked very carefully planned as they each had a square shaped background behind them with a spotlight reflecting their shadow. It was so interesting to hear these songs played with such intensity without a singer. The crowd quickly began to sing along and each of them encouraged this.

Eicca Toppinen spoke the most, thanking the fans and letting them know that since there was no singer they had to bring the songs to life. It was amazing that so much noise was made by their cellos, many times it sounded like there was an electric guitar playing the solos. Toppinen mentioned that this tour marked the return of Antero Manninen and that they were happy to have him back dedicating, “Welcome Home” to him.

Their set was split in two parts as we can only imagine how rough it is to play so long on their instruments. The first part was just the four of them and for the second part their drummer Mikko Siren joined. They called this their more rock section and asked the fans to stand up and enjoy, starting off with my favorite, “Fade to Black.” During “Seek & Destroy,” we could clearly see that Toppinen had lost a string from all the intense fretboard work going on.

Perttu Kivilaakso chatted with the crowd and brought up the scars that were on his and Toppinen’s face and joked, “It’s been a rough trip as you can see,” “This would be fun to say it happened in Christian Grey’s house but it didn’t,” and as fans laughed at the reference he added, “50 Shades of Cello,” that made it even funnier.

Their encore included a beautiful version of “Nothing Else Matters,” which had the whole space filled with the echo of the words, followed by “One.” Before closing out the show, Toppinen talked about the song being about war and he asked everyone to simply take care of each other and to love each other. A wonderful message to close a fantastic evening.

Check out more photos HERE.