Tenacious D - Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny (LP)

All Music Guide

It's easy but not accurate to call Tenacious D a onejoke band, since they do love one joke best of all: that they are the greatest band in the world. It's a credit to Jack Black and Kyle Gass' strengths as writers and performers that at their best they can convince you it's true. Like the best comedians, the key is both in the writing and the delivery: jokes can be good on paper, but they need to be delivered with flair, and few have the flair of Jack Black, who has made megalomania inspiring, even adorable. That quality combined with serious vocal chops anybody who saw him on Mr. Show's "The Joke: The Musical" back in 1997 knew that he could sing gave Tenacious D both star power and musical substance, while Gass grounds it by giving Jack a comic foil, plus lead guitar and harmony. When it all gels, as it did on their shortlived HBO series and their 2001 debut, it's glorious, but even that 2001 LP indicated a problem with the D: when the scale gets larger, they get smaller, or at lea...st their reason for being begins to unravel. Since the reason their joke works is that JB and KG are underdogs they're the best band in the world, it's just that the rest of the world hasn't figured it out yet when they're no longer underdogs, they're not quite as funny, or endearing. They're at their best when it's the two of them onstage, playing acoustic guitars and riffing off each other. They're good enough that they can survive a bigger budget, as the debut illustrates it always helps to have Dave Grohl on your side, of course but a really big budget is still a problem, as the soundtrack to their bigscreen extravaganza, The Pick of Destiny, proves.feel like narrative filler, even when they're melodic, memorable, and delivered with gusto by the D. And that's the crucial problem with the album: it's good, but it doesn't have the surplus of songs so great they sound like unearthed classics, which is the very thing that has always made Tenacious D so irresistible. Make no mistake, they're still great enough to rally: they revive "History," their indelible theme, incorporate "Sasquatch" into the deliriously atypical psychpop "Papagenu (He's My Sassafrass)," offer a Dethklokworthy ode to metalosity with "The Metal," and serve up two epics in "Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown)" served up as a duet with Dave Grohl, who plays Satan and the opening "Kickapoo," a tremendous minirock opera with cameos from Meat Loaf and Ronnie James Dio. Excellent moments, but it doesn't add up to a record that's as satisfying an album as the debut. This is a bit disappointing, but The Pick of Destiny is good as a soundtrack: a souvenir for fans of the film. That's enough for some portions of the legions of Dheads, but for some who have long loved the D, it's hard not to hear The Pick of Destiny and wish that it rocked both of your socks off instead of just one. - Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide Read more Less