Rating:
Genre:
Rock
Release Date: 07/02/2008
It's easy but not accurate to call
Tenacious D a one-joke 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 short-lived
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 least 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 on-stage, 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 big-screen extravaganza,
The Pick of Destiny, proves.
Jack and
Kyle have been promising a cinematic venture chronicling their rise to power since they -- alright, since
Jack turned into a star after stealing the show in the 2000 film
High Fidelity, and 2006's
The Pick of Destiny, made in collaboration with director/musician/prankster
Liam Lynch, finally follows through on that promise. Leave aside the merits of the movie and compare the
The Pick of Destiny soundtrack to the debut, and it's easy to see that this album is a very different beast than
Tenacious D. That first album captured the essence of the original
D -- the
D that was nothing but
Kage and
Jables and their guitars -- but pumped up with heaps of electric guitars and thunderous drums from
Grohl. It cribbed from a lot, but not all, of their standards, so it felt like a culmination of sorts: it finally felt like
the D blossomed into a genuine
rock band. In turn,
The Pick of Destiny has greater ambitions -- appropriately for a
soundtrack, it's big, sweeping, and well, cinematic -- but it doesn't feel like a breakthrough, since
Tenacious D already took
the D just about as far as they could go musically: it gave them muscle and might, it fleshed out their skeleton, sometimes a little bit too much, yet it worked because it sounded like this must be what
JB and
KG heard in their heads when they played on their own. There's no difference in sound on
The Pick of Destiny, but the aesthetic of a
soundtrack makes a huge difference. This may not be a concept album, but it's structured as a narrative, mirroring the plot of the movie. Unfortunately, this doesn't give
The Pick of Destiny the weight or grandeur of a true concept album, because a lot of the music sounds as if it serves the movie, and doesn't stand tall when separated from the film. It's easy to figure out that songs like
"Break In-City (Storm the Gate!)" and
"Car Chase City" are plot points in the film, but it's not quite as simple as that: since most of the album consists of songs that run between 1:20 and 2:40 minutes, all the tunes kind of
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
psych-pop "Papagenu (He's My Sassafrass)," offer a Dethklok-worthy 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 mini-
rock 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 D-heads, 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
;)
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