Tenacious D - The Pick Of Destiny (Single)
Epic Records - 82796948912 - November 14th, 2006
By Brandon Strader
This is a review of the
Pick of Destiny single, not the album which was released on the 14th. There are two nearly identical tracks featured on the single, the clean version and the album version of "The Pick Of Destiny", the song which plays at the end of the same-titled motion picture. The song isn't quite something a fan of the
D would have imagined before hearing it; it seems like a pretty large departure from their style, and it has a lot less comedy in it. Then again, the theaterical style in which the lyrics are sung, and the little one-liners are pretty silly, for example:
'Cause he who is sleezy is easy to pleasy... and she who is juicy must be loosey goosey... cause he who's a geezer must live in my freezer... and she who is starky is full of malarki... and if you're a diva, then go to geneva... and if you are snooty then sniff-a my booty...' and others, so needless to say the hilarious lyrics we've come to known from
The D are still there. The song recaps the story of the band's history - whether real or false, we'll never know - wherein
Jack Black meets
Kyle Gass on Venice Beach and is taught by the mysterious wigged-stranger all of the techniques that were developed in hell! Techniques like the acoustic rock solo near the end, and the strummed chords that make up a lot of the song.
The actual song sounds pretty much like your standard rock song, except it's got the comic duo of
Jack Black and
Kyle Gass pushing it along, which already makes it a bit better. There's an acoustic guitar panned to the left, and a distorted guitar panned to the right which makes up the two performances, and gives the illusion that the song is both heavy
and acoustic. The song is short as heck at 2 and a half minutes, and it is much less epic than
(some of) the other songs from the full-length, but it still rocks pretty hard. I've seen them perform the song live twice from Letterman to the Conan O'Brien show, and they always manage to keep it entertaining and fun throughout. On Late Night with Conan O'Brien recently,
Black got bleeped for saying something during the song to the effects of
'suck on my gonad'. Why that got bleeped, we will never know. The album version of "Pick of Destiny" features the juicy F-bombs that the band has used so much, it almost feels like it's not a bad word anymore! "The Pick Of Destiny" is a rockin' tune and a great ending to an album that you could probably enjoy many times, yet it probably works better along with the full-length album due to the storytelling of the concept.
7.5/10
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Official Tenacious D Website
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