Album: Tenacious D

Album: Tenacious D, Epic

Celebrity, particularly in America, has a momentum that can easily slip out of control – as witness this album from Tenacious D, the nom de disque of comedy duo Kyle Glass and Jack Black. Best known as surly record-shop assistant Barry in High Fidelity, Black's star is firmly in the ascendant following assured chat-show appearances and his recent graduation to romantic lead opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal. Accordingly, anything is possible for him – specifically, in this case, the chance to record an album of his lame rock spoofs, and have Spike Jonze shoot a promo video. The result is as stuffed full of swearing and scatology as a Derek & Clive album, but strangely bereft of even the slightest skidmark of humour: where Cook and Moore could ad-lib crude exchanges with consummate comic invention, Black's shortcomings are apparent in his frequent lapses into manic screaming, as if volume alone might transform clunker lines into comedy gold. Spinal Tap it ain't: fatuous skits about writing a one-note song and inventing "inward singing" ("the most powerful tool in singing technology since yodelling, dude!") are interspersed with entry-level hard-rock spoofs, whose one joke is the yawning gap between the duo's minimal talent and the colossal egotism of their fanciful self-mythologising. Sadly, "yawning" is the appropriate term here, the 21 tracks barely raising a snigger between them.