About halfway through Tenacious D's soundtrack to their new movie, "The Pick of Destiny," right around the off-the-wall psych-pop ode to Jack Black's Sasquatch dad, even the biggest fan of the D might start to realize why the movie failed to crack the top ten at the box office.
Based on the soundtrack, the movie sounds so ridiculous that it might actually be kind of bad.
That could seem completely antithetical to everything Black (aka JB, aka Jables) and his guitarist/side-kick Kyle Gass (aka KG, aka Kage) stood for on their self-titled debut.
Between forgetting the song that they used to defeat the Devil in a rock battle, left to create a "Tribute" to the song that beat Beelzebub, and innovating hard rock with inward singing, Tenacious D simultaneously took all the hot air out of metal, while at the same time blowing it up to Meatloavian proportions.
Like the stoner kids of Spinal Tap, Jables and Kage mashed obscenely hilarious lyrics with tasty, Zep-inspired riffs while extolling everything from friendship to karate.
The new album opens with a song that brings us to a town called "Kickapoo," where a young Jack Black tries to break free from his metal-hating dad. While it establishes the rather thin plot, the song isn't constrained by it, functioning only as a playground where Black can mess around with new inventive swears and act like a rock star.
The D are on top of their game on the track, with an acoustic folk-rock opening where JB battles a dragon before Black's father, voiced by none other than Meatloaf, brings the "Bat Out of Hell" bombast and a crush of power chords.
By the time metal god Ronnie James Dio comes down from his throne on a chariot of thundering drums, it's clear that even if the D aren't the best band ever, as they claim, they can still rock like few others.
For the first half of the record, you get everything you'd expect from a Tenacious D album and really no mention of the movie. "History" recounts the origins of the band, which was there when Jesus died and has also stopped a moving train.
"The Government Totally Sucks" is the only protest song that will complain about the hypothetical treatment of Ben Franklin (according to the D, not only a patriotic genius, but also a nudist stoner) if he lived in present-day and the extinction of the "beautiful animals" in the same breath.
"Master Exploder" is an effective reminder that Jack Black, despite looking like a convenience store employee, is actually a surprisingly good singer.
Next is "Papagenu (He's My Sassafrass)," the aforementioned Sasquatch ode, which on first listen is actually one of the funniest songs on the album.
It's hard not to laugh at JB's Sasquatch dad, sadly not played by Meatloaf, who sounds like the Missing Link with more than a few missing brain cells.
Trying to put it into the context of a movie ruins it; it just becomes too strange.
"Papagenu" also starts a streak of songs that don't really do anything but advance the plot of the movie. "Papagenu" stands out, since it's done in a new style for the band, more '60s pop than '70s metal, but "Break-in City" and "Car Chase City" are generic and, worst of all, not funny.
The end of the album tries to bring the D back to basics. "Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown)" finally details for us their battle with the Devil, but the song they play is not the greatest ever, and isn't even as good as their tribute to it.
Penultimate track "POD" is really just a commercial for the movie, and it sounds like it was written in less time than it actually takes to play it.
"The Metal" closes the album, with JB and KG standing triumphant over the corpses of the genres (punk, new wave and grunge) that tried and failed to kill metal.
It's the perfect image to end the album on: the newly crowned kings of metal holding their Flying V guitars over their heads, astride a mountain of metal's vanquished foes.
In his superb book of the 500 greatest metal albums, "Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe," critic Chuck Eddy says that metal "had no redeeming social value, and it was real loud about it and funny, too."
In that respect, even if the album weakens when it merely transcribes the movie's plot, what could be more metal than two fat guys playing songs about Sasquatch amid a whirlwind of vulgarity backed by the blasting of an army of amps all turned up to 11?
