Location: Zagreb / Tvornica kulture / Croatia
Date: Monday, 20.01.2020
Apocalyptica made a stop in Zagreb at the start of their tour promoting their ninth album Cell-0. On the three-week run they’re supporting Sweden’s Sabaton, but Zagreb got a standalone headline set from the Finns.
A lot has changed since Apocalyptica’s early days as a quartet of cellists covering Metallica — and since their first show here at Križanke (2001). Back then, an acoustic cover band of classically trained string players blew the metal world’s mind, and rightly so. That novelty caught on and might have sustained the fanbase a little longer, but the musicians needed to push forward. First came a drummer and effects on the cellos, then a move beyond covering other people’s music into writing their own — which made them a genuine metal band — and later still, collaborations with a long list of guest vocalists. Their newly released all-instrumental album almost feels like a step back. That quick history lesson is necessary context for what follows: a critique of Monday’s Zagreb show, which is really a question about how successfully Apocalyptica translates their studio albums to the live stage without losing the very thing that sets them apart from everyone else — they are cellists who play metal.
As mentioned, Apocalyptica played Zagreb alone, without a local support act. The current live lineup is three cellists and a drummer. The roughly two-hour set can be broken into three sections: instrumentals (both covers and originals), vocal tracks, and material from the new album.
The instrumentals were the ones that woke the crowd up the most — though it quickly became clear that even the radio-friendly Nothing Else Matters no longer has the pull it once did among the people in that room. Quite the shift from their earlier shows, when the audience singing along was a necessary and extraordinary part of an Apocalyptica concert. Now only a handful of throats joined in, and only on the choruses of the better-known Metallica and Sepulture covers.
On most of the original tracks that featured guest vocalists on record, Tipe Johnson has been filling that role for several tours running. He does the job well, but unfortunately he shifts the focus away from the exceptional instrumentalists and reduces the cellists to mere backing musicians. Set aside the visual element — with the drums and added effects, the fact that this backing is played on strings barely registers. What’s more, the audience engages with him only rarely, which makes it feel as though the band needs a vocalist to break up the monotony of the instrumental passages — something that, years ago, the crowd itself used to take care of.
The vocalist was also responsible for some of the most irritating moments of the evening. We’re all used to a good chunk of any audience not really being present — just standing there as a human tripod for whatever device they’re using to faithfully document proceedings. Nothing new there. But Johnson took the role of in-show disruption onto himself with his own phone: spending part of the time filming from the side of the stage, part of it filming while actually performing, and wandering between the cellists during moments when he had nothing else to do. More than anyone else on or off that stage, he was completely tuned out, beholden to some social media feed, and he destroyed whatever small connection still existed between the audience and the performers.
The crowd, which filled the Tvornica kulture hall nicely, received everything warmly — including the new tracks played live for the first time — with applause and the occasional cheer. But for a metal concert, that’s below par; it’s passive. Even though the musicians are seasoned pros at working a room, the hall stayed quiet except for rare moments and only with heavy prompting from the stage. Those up on the small balcony at the back watched the whole show sitting down. Only a handful of people in the front row and a few lone wolves scattered through the crowd moved their necks; not many voices joined in, as already noted, and there wasn’t even a whiff of a mosh pit — not even during the thrash classics, which were at least the moments when the guys on stage let loose and gave off some actual metal concert energy.
Apocalyptica, judging by their festival presence, remain a metal band. And it’s at festivals where the old-school fans who know how to respond to their earlier material still are — the ones who can make a real metal concert happen. But their headline shows have now gone several tours in a row searching for that genuine connection with the audience. I don’t want this to read as nostalgia — “everything was better fifteen years ago.” What I will say is that the band once had a formula for a successful headline show, one that struck the right balance between instrumental tracks and vocal songs — and crucially, left those vocal songs to the audience rather than handing them to a vocalist on stage.
If their otherness (including their instrumental approach to metal) was the magnet at the start, their original work has since pulled them in different directions and away from their genre and their core audience. You can’t expect musicians of their caliber to spend their entire career playing covers — that would be the traditional path of the classically trained orchestra musician, and it isn’t theirs. So of course they explored their creativity through vocal collaborations. But in pushing what makes them unique to the background, they became on record too similar to any other band, and live they’ve struggled to translate studio material into a compelling show. Perhaps their latest release — purely instrumental — signals a turn back toward their essence: metal played on strings, on stage as well.
To say that the musicians on stage delivered anything less than a competent performance would be an insult to Apocalyptica; to say that the atmosphere at Monday’s concert was great would be an insult to the audience. The show was just fine. In other words: it’ll be easy to forget because there was nothing exceptional about it — but it wasn’t bad either.
author: Mojca Selak
photos: Jan Prpič
video: Mojca Selak
Setlist:
1. Ashes of the Modern World
2. PAth / Fields Of Verdun
3. Refuse / Resist
3. Rise
4. En Route To Mayhem
5. I’m Not Jesus
6. Not Strong Enough
7. Shadowmaker
9. Nothing Else Matters
10. Cell-O
11. Grace
12. Seek And Destroy
13. Inquisition Symphony
14. I Don’t Care
15. In the Hall of the Mountain King
