Tenacious D - Post-Apocalypto

I don’t even know where to start with this album. Tenacious D has always been weird and comedically irreverent, and it has long been to the benefit of helping their nutty brand of comedy rock stand out. And their very spaced out releases have been getting weirder and weirder, but But Kyle Gass and Jack Black have done with Post-Apocalypto seems wildly more ridiculous than anything they have done before.

Yes, Tenacious D has been completely absurd in the past, writing songs about doing push-ups with their boners and doing LSD with Sasquatch. But for the most part their comedic music has been relatively digestible and straightforward.

Post-Apocalypto is kind of a what-the-fuck album of ridiculous confusion all the way through. It’s not like experimentally musically weird; the band play mostly the same basic acoustic comedy rock they’re played throughout their whole careers.

The album serves as a conclusion to a short animated series that JB and KG provide their characters and voices to, and… I would say it follows a linear narrative… but that’s almost a detail that doesn’t even matter.

The twenty-one very short tracks alternate between short acoustic ditties and narrative breaks driven by the voices of the characters, indicated by the mostly corresponding pattern of all-caps titles and all-lowercase titles.

This album is just half and hour long and the band manage to make quite the fucking mess of it with all the time they’ve got. It’s set in an absolutely absurd post-apocalypitc world in which Kage and Jables wake up to the supposed end of humanity. But this isn’t some quirky, smart hipster comedy meant to provide a sense of humor to the very tangible feeling of all of humanity being destroyed. Did you see the fucking cover?

Over the course of the album’s whacked out plot, Jack Black and Kyle Gass meet space-dwelling scientists, the KKK guards of the White House, and a new robot friend with a very poor Arnold Schwarzenegger voice impression, and get their dicks sucked by cave women, among other things.

The story is obviously intentionally stupid and all over the place, but for all its wackiness, I didn’t really find this album to be all that funny. It had some moments of wittiness and slapstick humor that I enjoyed or at least appreciated, but it seemed like more of an indulgent, goof-off than a Tenacious D album six years in the waiting for. Perhaps that’s part of their goof on us, the anti-climactic nature of this fucking thing coming out after the six years since Rize of the Fenix, but it’s a one-chuckle-and-done kind of album. There’s no sense reliving the whole thing, and there’s no “Fuck Her Gently” or “Kickapoo” to come back to either. “COLORS” is a kind of cheesily soulful number I guess, “MAKING LOVE” is a decent ode to the pleasures of sex in the post-apocalyptic world, and “DADDY DING DONG” is a nice enough bit of metallic flair for the album.

But overall, this is a rather disappointing, undercooked Tenacious D album, musically and comedically that definitely doesn’t live up to any of the band’s previous albums.