Tenacious D: Tenacious D : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Every metal generation sees a new team of high priests take over the Temple of Syrinx, and now is the hour of Tenacious D, standing tall on rock's Mount Olympus with their acoustic guitars and a songbook full of pure stoner poetry. Jack Black and Kyle Gass are the twin visionaries here: two sloppy dudes strumming and wailing the hysterically funny Seventies faux-metal ballads that have already made Tenacious D legendary for their L.A. club gigs as well as their short-lived HBO series. (You've also seen Black onscreen as the loudmouthed record clerk in High Fidelity.) The D's long-awaited debut album is an angel-dustrial bong-water brew of Styx, Rush and Triumph, with a dollop of Journey, a soup‡on of Kansas, loads of Zep and Sabbath, a pinch of Black Oak Arkansas, maybe a dash of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Not since Bob and Doug McKenzie have two jokers nailed the clod-metal aesthetic so accurately: Nearly every lyric here comes straight from your high school's bathroom wall.

Tenacious D sounds like it was bashed out in one dazed and confused all-nighter, with musical help from famous pals such as Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, Phish's Page McConnell and producers the Dust Brothers. But what makes the D such noble warriors is their mastery of every Seventies-rock clich‚, from the Skynyrd-esque groupie-chasing boogie "The Road" to the perfect Steve Howe-style guitar filigree in the middle of "Rock Your Socks." You also get the best song ever written about Ronnie James Dio ("Dio"), the best song ever written about kielbasa ("Kielbasa"), tormented battle-of-evermore prog narratives such as "Wonderboy" and "Tribute," and the for-lovers-only acoustic ballad "Fuck Her Gently," where Black adopts his most sensitive Steve Perry voice to charm the ladies with sweet nothings like "I'm gonna hump you sweetly/I'm gonna ball you discreetly." Tenacious D are more than rock stars, much more: They're the Thor and Zeus of a new rock religion, prophets of blood and honor, overlords from the land of the ice and snow. They ask no quarter. They give no quarter. They are the D.