martindavey87 Here’s something that I imagine nobody asked for, and I imagine not many people are interested to listen to, but here we have it anyway; ‘Plays Metallica by Four Cellos’ by Apocalyptica. An album of Metallica covers played by, well… four cello players.

I give them kudos for originality, I mean, surely there’s not much else out there like this, and in their world of classical instruments, this might make them stand out quite a bit (it sure must have, because they’d go on to become a legit metal band), but overall, this is just kind of boring to listen to. I don’t care much for cellos, although a full-blown orchestra covering Metallica would have been more exciting. But cellos? No thanks.

Still, it makes an interesting novelty listen I guess. But after one or two plays the novelty wears thin. Why would anyone want to listen to this over the actual Metallica versions? Perhaps classical music fans that want to dabble in something different than the usual Bach or Beethoven? Who knows?

The end result, however, is that it put them on the map, and now they’re in a successful recording and touring band, and I’m not. So maybe I need to take up the cello instead!

Vim Fuego This is one of those hard ones to decide on. OK, so it's Metallica tunes, but played by a cello quartet? Have Monty Python gotten back together? Surely, this takes the piss!

But no, here it is, and it doesn't sound half bad. Four Finnish guys, looking like Amorphis' roadcrew, sawing away at antique instruments (one was made in 1738!), and producing some of the most bizarre interpretations of these songs you will ever hear. And it's just cellos — no percussion, no guitars, no singing, and no amplification.

Without the drums and the amps, some songs, and parts of songs, simply do not work. "Enter Sandman" is a prime example. It is too simplistic to do cellos justice. The introductory riff to "Harvester Of Sorrow" also sounds wrong. However, as that particular song progresses, each instrument plays a different guitar line, while one follows the vocal harmony. The end product is something which sounds like a modernist avant–garde classical composition.

However, Metallica did include classical guitar elements in some of their songs, which do work with cellos. The intricacies of the middle passage of "Master Of Puppets" are given new life. The plucked strings and melancholic introduction to "The Unforgiven" also work well, but then go down the toilet once the vocal melody kicks in. "Sanitarium" is probably the best of the bunch, as Apocalyptica's interpretation is sensitive at times, but then also as heavy as you're ever going to hear four cellos get, unless they fall on your head.

On a whole, this is a novelty album, plain and simple. It also shows that no matter how good they are/were at penning memorable metal anthems, Metallica and classical music just don't mix. It also shows Apocalyptica are incredibly talented at what they do, as some of the material they have to work with is decidedly mediocre. This is an album for Metallica enthusiasts who enjoyed 'Load' and 'Re–Load', and can stomach 'S&M'. For everyone else, it is of curiosity value only.

siLLy puPPy Although not exactly comparable, I think this is a better idea and much prefer this to Metallica's own S&M, which was a good idea but in practice sounded like a sloppy metal band battling it out with a symphonic orchestra without any interesting results. On this debut release by APOCALYPTICA they simply play classic Metallica songs on 4 cellos. All is performed amazingly well.

The entire album is instrumental and there is no percussion so in effect it is one cello each covering the vocals, two guitars and bass of the original songs. All cellos are acoustic and nothing here is amplified so i'm not sure if this really counts as metal but it certainly has the intensity.

I wouldn't want to hear several albums of this sort of thing but this one has kept me interested for quite some time now. All of the song choices are good but I lean toward the ones of the albums I like best from Metallica of the 80s. Wisely the group decided to add percussion and write their own material after the success of this album.