For a musical style designed with the express purpose of aggressively alienating the majority of listeners that might encounter it, black metal has proven to be exceedingly amenable to mixing with other genres. In recent years it's gained influence in the underground metal world, and in the process of expanding has spawned a number of hybrid offspring, from relatively predictable combinations like blackened death metal and blackened crust punk to such unexpected variants as black-metal-influenced industrial music and the accurately named subgenre black 'n' roll.
Greatest of Deceivers, the fourth album by Borre, Norway's Nidingr since 1996, the group takes a black metal approach to a lengthy list of influences. The group's mastermind, Morten Iversen, better known as Teloch, has been involved in the Scandinavian black metal scene since the prime of its second wave when it was ruled by a hardline orthodoxy that didn't allow for much in the way of crossover, and when a lot of other metal scenes didn't want much to do with it in return.
Despite his involvement with such classically-minded groups as Mayhem, Gorgoroth, 1349, and Ov Hell, Iversen's got an especially broad sonic vision. Greatest of Deceivers is a dense and complex mass made up of songs that themselves generally have more discrete movements than you can count on one hand. Some of them offer blackened takes on full-throttle death metal and crust punk. Others offer complicated leads and tricky time signatures that hint at mathcore and sometimes even at a particularly gnarly interpretation of jazz. Occasionally the group cuts back the aggression sharply and coasts into near-ambiance. In terms of compositional ambition the songs are closer to the labyrinthine post-rock and post-hardcore bands of the mid to late 90s than the savagely straightforward black metal outfits that were operating around the same time.
This complexity is a double edged sword. On the one hand there is something about listening to a finely tuned band rip through such daunting compositions with machine-like precision that is very easy to enjoy in the same way as watching Olympic-level sports or other human skill refined to a point far out of the reach of the average person. There's also just a surfeit of material to digest, and having it come at you at such a rapid rate can be satisfyingly overwhelming. Black metal's had symphonic ambitions since it first took root in Norway, and Nidingr's baroque works often feel like the a group reaching to live up to them and succeeding.
But the problem with extreme partsiness, as many of the aforementioned post-rock and post-hardcore bands have demonstrated, is that the more parts you add to a song the greater the likelihood that one or more is going to be a clunker, and on Greatest of Deceivers the clunkers come at a distractingly steady pace. The tricky mathcore bits are technically impressive, but when they pop up in the middle of a blistering bit of truly wicked death metal it can ruin the mood. The group's also less adept at spacey textural playing than the fast-and-complicated stuff, and the quasi-ambient excursions can be stiff and vaguely awkward.
The frustrating part is that when the band dials down their ambition and plays it straight on the mid-album highlights "The Balances" and "Vim Patior", they're untouchable, with the perfect ratio of brutality to finesse. Iversen and his longtime creative partner Damien "Blargh" Hammeren both favor thick, crunchy guitar tones over the traditional tinny black metal attack, and on pummelling tracks like "The Balances" they cleverly fit together just a couple of guitar parts to make a gestalt that sounds very big and very evil, with hooky riffs snuck into the mix almost subliminally. It feels wrong to fault a bunch of musicians for being ambitious and wanting to challenge themselves and their audience, but when a band is so good at playing it straight and simple it's hard to argue that they even need to.
