{"id":6040,"date":"2025-12-07T23:31:30","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T23:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/?p=6040"},"modified":"2025-12-08T06:12:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T06:12:52","slug":"metallica-and-apocalyptica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/metallica-and-apocalyptica\/","title":{"rendered":"Metallica and Apocalyptica"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t like heavy metal music. I pretty much hate it. If you’d ever asked me if I’d put a Metallica song on my playlist, I’d have told you no. But I’ve done just that. More precisely, I just added a\u00a0cover<\/em> of a Metallica song. The title is Nothing Else Matters<\/em>. I still don’t think I’ll ever add an actual Metallica recording, but I listened to the original and it’s not very offensive to my ears although it’s not something I’d choose to listen to. The cover is by the band Apocalyptica, which, despite its heavy metal sounding name, is not a metal band. It’s four cellos that cover rock songs arranged in a heavy sort of classical-rock style. The song is a rather somber almost dirge-like number and quite beautiful on the cellos.<\/p>\n

I had actually asked some AI bots for recommendations of modern bands that do classical pieces in a semi-rock style similar to A Fifth of Beethoven<\/em> or T\u00e9taz’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor<\/em>. I got some recommendations meeting that criteria but one bot recommended Apocalyptica, warning me that it mostly did the reverse, i.e. took rock songs and did them in a semi-classical style, so it wasn’t a case of AI hallucinating.<\/p>\n

Here are some other songs I just added to my playlists:<\/p>\n