...to Reduce the Choir to One Soloist

Right around 1996, I started getting deep into the more chaotic side of metallic hardcore. Bands like Deadguy, Bloodlet, and Coalesce were bringing up a fresh and energetic sound from the hardcore underground. A sound whose spastic song structures and annihilating aggression easily crossed over into certain sub-sections of metal. It was a brief and potent time. Most of these bands lasted only a few years, the turmoil of their music reflected in their own make-up. One band, however, burned brighter, darker, and more briefly than all the others. Acme, from Bremen, Germany whose intensity never slackened and who were gone before we ever really knew them. To Reduce The Choir To One Soloist is a compilation that collects all of Acme's recorded output: nine tracks, thirty-five minutes of hyper-insane, death-inflected hardcore mayhem.

Opening with a sample from Full Metal Jacket, Acme takes you on a dark and violent ride with "Blind." Harsh, blackened screams of neurotic terror dictate your first impressions as the savage vocalizations mount horrific waves of atonal riffage and frenetic double-bass alterations. When the breakdown hits, it isn't chugga-chugga bro-core but the toxic, infernal sludge of Eyehategod that confronts, dragging the tune down into seventh-level hell where an incredible, unrelenting atmosphere of suicidal darkness pervades and remains. As the tracklist continues, the big textured riffs and hammering rhythms drill themselves deep into your brain. This is memorable stuff, mainly because it was so unique at the time that it has somehow managed to remain timeless. The tediousness of scene-politics hardcore and gangsta tough-guy elements are entirely avoided. Instead, infusions of grind and power-violence prevail. Strains of death metal are sequenced into their DNA as well. All of it drenched in thickening sludge and the prolonged agony of despair. This is dark shit. And I am grateful for it.

Whereas most of their colleagues fell off, sold-out, imploded, or just plain aged poorly, Acme remain potent and mysterious. To Reduce The Choir To One Soloist isn't for everyone. It's single-minded brutality transmitted through a stew of ranging influences can be off-putting for some but for me it remains a timeless and essential release.

Acme were the first band to apply a broad range of extreme metal genres to the hardcore scene. Their purest influences probably come from earlier hardcore bands like Rorschach, but these are hidden within a dense funeral fog of sludge, death, black metal and grindcore. Acme straddle it all without ever being confined to these genre limitations.


Songs like ‘Attempt’ are the soundtrack to the end of the world itself; all-encompassing slabs of metal noise cascade into true majestic extremity. This is epic in a streamlined two-minute hardcore sense, not in a bloated, overindulgent metal sense. Acme lay waste to any of your pre-conceptions about the validity of the metal/hardcore crossover. People who like intense, dark, challenging, extreme music of any form should buy this yesterday.