Apocalyptica is a Finnish neo-classical metal band/cello metal band that basically includes some elements of an almost Finnish baroque style, progressive metal, and the obvious heavy metal. What a combination of styles if I do say so myself. The band has three cellists, a pianist and the occasional violinist along with your traditional heavy metal artillery, and man does this give the band more options in terms of sound.
When you mention Apocalyptica, you generally think of the Metallica covers early in their career or their Worlds Collide album including tracks like I Don't Care, I'm Not Jesus, Helden, and Not Strong Enough all of which include a famous vocalist from the rock universe. Adam Gontier from Three Days Grace was in I Don't Care, Till Lindermann from Rammstein was in Helden and Corey Taylor from Slipknot was in I'm Not Jesus just to name a few. Now with Shadowmaker, they only enlisted the help from one single vocalist who I've been reliably told is from System of The Down I believe. He does have a pretty versatile voice I will admit and can for the emotional impact of each track very well. That said, some of Apocalyptica's longest tracks could possibly be here in this album. The title track, Till Death Do Us Part and Dead Man's Eyes are the longest tracks on the album with the latter spanning nearly ten minutes. Yeah, they've gotten serious and are not pulling any punches here. Tracks like Slow Burn, Cold Blood, Till Death Do Us Part and Dead Man's Eyes all register a more somber, a more emotional feel to the album and is heavily backed by beautiful sounding cellos and violin work. The instrumentals, and there's three of them, are all great representations and provide great use of the band-cello coordination. With the exception of Till Death Do Us Part, the instrumentals mostly seem to act as more of a "look what I can do" scenario though, which doesn't seem like the Apocalyptica I'm fairly used to. I can sense a very classy, almost chamber music style from this as well that you can almost imagine that sort of scenario when listening to this album and is always something that needs to be explored more in my opinion. Dead Man's Eyes seems to take a page out of Nightwish's Endless Forms Most Beautiful and leave almost nothing but pure atmosphere for the last half of the song, similar to The Greatest Show On Earth. Whether or not that has paying homage, you be the judge but it makes the ending of this album, that much sadder and emotional, at least in my case. Also if you get the deluxe edition, you will get a live performance of The Hall of The Mountain King which is incredible and probably better than I will ever be able to do for a while. They do seem to change up some parts as well and include some extra parts as well. If you love that song, you will love their version both live and in studio.
For elegance and emotional prowess, I will safely say it's gonna be a great contender for the end of the year for me. I just have to say, long live Apocalyptica and I will always love your music. You guys rock! I give this album a 9.5/10. I am the Grim Reaper, signing off.