Metal, cellos and a mosh pit
By Lauren Kalinowski
Imagine you’re in a small performing arts theatre on the university campus. You’re at a spring performance by a local ballet group – young students. The next piece is by mid-teen ballerinas. You’re probably expecting tutus, pointe shoes and a pretty classical number.
Then the curtain rises to darkness. A cello calls out, low-E into an e-minor arpeggio. You know that intro. The lights come up and the dancers are silhouetted on stage. Is that Metallica? The warm, deep voice of the stringed instrument is then joined by partner, then a third player. The lights come up and you’re witnessing ballet danced to a classical cover of “Nothing Else Matters.”
That was my introduction to Apocalyptica, as a teenager. I can’t describe it to you – next time they’re in town (and they’ve promised to return) – you need to go see it.
When I drove by the Midway in Edmonton, twenty years later, and saw they were playing here on February 21, 2025, I hit the next stop light and ordered tickets right there.
As a venue, The Midway does concerts well. There’s tonnes of parking, a quick-moving lineup, and the floor itself is intimate but spacious at the same time. For Apocalyptica, people were lined up down the block and around the corner on an early not-quite-spring night. 6:30 doors seemed early, and an hour later the opener was just getting started.
That line was full of every kind of person. The typical big-bearded, plaid-shirted Edmonton dudes. Post-punk era mohawked moms in combat boots. Goth girls with perfect makeup, lace and tutus. Hair of all colours – pink, teal and purple. Older couples, young metal fans. And me, ex-ballerina, in my mom jeans and tailored coat. It didn’t matter; we were all just there for the music.
The electric guitar was audible from the street out front as we waited to go in.
We squeezed in behind a couple in matching patched Slayer denim jackets with metal studs on the shoulders. This is where the emo kids from my high school were hanging out, twenty years later.
Metal is not my scene. I’ve never seen a mosh pit in real life. Beside me, my friend Ani asked me if we were going to get in the pit. A mosh pit at a cello concert…? What was I in for?
The opener was a tall, slim blonde killing it with fast fingers on her electric guitar. Most of her songs had no lyrics, then she was eventually joined by another badass woman. Kacey Karlson of Deadlands, with equally long black hair was stylistically perfect for their in-sync hair swinging and head banging.
The music reverberated through my body. I felt the vibrations off the strings. The crowd was the fun kind of rowdy, still making room for each other to ensure we could all see the stage. An aging bald man with eyeliner graciously apologized for stepping in front of my view.
Karlson’s voice reached through the electric guitar and crashing drums into the safety of the dark, putting the audience onto one heartbeat. Nita Strauss promised to “keep it heavy, we’re also as fans of Apocalyptica.” She’s toured with Alice Cooper and Demi Lovato. She told the crowd, “I’ve been here but my band hasn’t, let’s show them Edmonton.” An eager-to-please sea of happy fist pumping delivered.
The masterful guitarist was the first woman to top the Billboard Rock Airplay chart in three decades in 2022. Her band played that song, ‘Dead Inside’, and the crowd screamed along, followed by ‘Victorious’.
“This one goes out to the internet trolls,” yelled Strauss. On a slow song, real Bic lighters ignited the sea and we swayed together, travelling back to a time when cell phone flashlights didn’t exist.
At the end of the set we were primed and ready, though I’d have been happy if that was the show I’d come for. She’s one hell of a guitarist. It felt like the stage turnover took ages. We tried to be patient. The crowd became antsy with the lights up, pushing and shoving to get to the bar.
Thunder and lightning brought us back.
That was our cue: Apocalyptica was headed to the stage. Squeezing closer row by row, we were right up there, a couple people back from the stage.
“You Canadians, you know how it is,” headman Eicca Toppinen said, talking about the cold spell we’d just been through. From Helsinki, Finland, the three men on stage were walking conundrums with heavy black kohl around their eyes, in full metal band costumes of cuffs, chains and ripped black jeans, and cradling cellos on their way to the stage.
And those cellos sang, like only hollow-bodied classical stringed instruments can sing, in heavy, rich, warm tones that rippled vibrations to my bones. Perttu Kivilaakso, the lead cello, the man with the fancy fingers, complained how he’d only slept twelve hours in the last three days. Though he was aching he told us, “[we’d] brought him back from death,” screaming, chanting and singing along.
When Apocalyptica plays Metallica’s “The Call of Ktulu,” they’re not merely “covering” the song; they’re engaging in a form of musical alchemy. They extract the essence of the original and transmute it into something entirely new yet hauntingly familiar, tapping into the primal energy that makes “The Call of Ktulu” powerful. But they channel it through their unique artistic lens, creating a portal to some far-off Scandinavian land.
Their energy, passion and talent keeps them going strong song after song. These men aren’t young. The band has been creating music and touring for 28 years. Soul-patched Paavo Lotjonen seduces the audience with his eyes, dressed like a tidy chef in a collared shirt and rolled-up sleeves, somewhere between a blue-collar dad and member of the orchestra making love to his cello. He makes us all fall in love with him without speaking a word.
Watching them swap between hair slinging, stomping heavy metal and soft, gentle instrumentals, I’ve become transfixed. My body is moving on its own as though they’re conducting me with their bows. I’m not the only one affected.
Maybe Canadians need more heavy metal in these bitterly cold, anger-inducing months to manage our pent-up cabin fever. The Scandinavians might be onto something. These musical men on stage, maybe they’re not quite human, musicians of the frozen fae.
The mosh pit is moshing. I briefly see someone lifted over the crowd. People around me are body-checking each other to the beat. I grasp the handrail beside me hoping no one knocks me over. Energy builds between songs, but the crowd is under control. Courtesy continues: I see men protecting their women, making space for the crazed moshers. The beat is all around me; it’s even bouncing up from the wooden floorboards as they spring to the beat of the jumping crowd .
Things start to get out of hand, and the crowd puts attention on one short guy in a brown ball cap. Pleasure becomes fury. The bouncers are on it in seconds; they’ve singled him out with their flashlights. The sea of dancers parts, three burly men triangulate on the ball cap, and he’s hustled out. Allegedly, he was handsy on the dance floor.
On cue, the band turns down the lights, pulls out their stools and sits for a quiet number. They’d been standing the whole time – sweat dripping and hands cramping – they played on. I hear the cue: low-E rising into the arpeggio. We were under the spell of the cello-slinging puppeteers as the northern lights projected on the screen behind them.
With eyes closed, I was taken back to the first time I heard those notes of ‘Nothing Else Matters’ on the cello, on stage with my ballerina silhouette projected. This time Toppinen is plucking the notes on strings ten feet away from me. The volume builds slowly to the chorus, and Kivilaakso is directing our motion with his fingers flying up and down the neck of his cello, then he stands again. Lotjonen is inside himself with the music, cheek to the neck of his instrument, pulling the essence of the song into the air around him. At that moment, I’m sure every woman in the crowd ached to be that cello.
They brought us up, they brought us down, they played three encores. We laughed when lead man Toppinen, the one who spoke the most that night, told us “today music sounds pretty much really shit, it’s very polished and really hydrated.” Apocalyptica was both polished and raw exactly where they needed to be. He told us how the band started, when he just thought “how cool would it be to play [Metallica] on the cellos?”
In his monologue, he asked himself, “Why Metallica? It was really the thing when we were talking, there were so many songs… we just did the first album for the fun of it. We’ve now been doing original music all these years but it’s actually moving forward,” describing the band’s meandering path starting with the classical Metallica, playing onto their own music, and back to Metallica recently, but reinventing yet again. “We have to feel we’re putting something new on the table that people aren’t recognizing, [that’s] the fucking point.”
He knew how to win over this town, reminding the crowd “we’re from Finland and our ice hockey team sucks,” but “Edmonton was the first city [they] heard mentioned from Canada, [you] guys play some fucking hockey!”
The athleticism of these musicians, playing standing with cellos in a semi-squat, the tendons in their hands taut, through the long set, was astonishing. At one point Kivilaakso picked up his cello and played it over his head like it was a weightless electric guitar.
“We’re still going strong,” Toppinen said in his send-off, and he was grateful to Edmonton’s “wonderful human beings.”
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