It's easy but not accurate to call Tenacious D a one-joke band, since they do love one joke best of all: that they are the greatest band in the world. It's a credit to Jack Black and Kyle Gass' strengths as writers and performers that at their best they can convince you it's true. Like the best comedians, the key is both in the writing and the delivery: jokes can be good on paper, but they need to be delivered with flair, and few have the flair of Jack Black, who has made megalomania inspiring, even adorable. That quality combined with serious vocal chops -- anybody who saw him on Mr. Show's "The Joke: The Musical" back in 1997 knew that he could sing -- gave Tenacious D both star power and musical substance, while Gass grounds it by giving Jack a comic foil, plus lead guitar and harmony. When it all gels, as it did on their short-lived HBO series and their 2001 debut, it's glorious, but even that 2001 LP indicated a problem with the D: when the scale gets larger, they get smaller, or at least their reason for being begins to unravel. Since the reason their joke works is that JB and KG are underdogs -- they're the best band in the world, it's just that the rest of the world hasn't figured it out yet -- when they're no longer underdogs, they're not quite as funny, or endearing. They're at their best when it's the two of them on-stage, playing acoustic guitars and riffing off each other. They're good enough that they can survive a bigger budget, as the debut illustrates -- it always helps to have Dave Grohl on your side, of course -- but a really big budget is still a problem, as the soundtrack to their big-screen extravaganza The Pick of Destiny proves.

1		Kickapoo
2		Classico
3		Baby
4		Destiny
5		History
6		The Government Totally Sucks
7		Master Exploder
8		The Divide
9		Papagenu (He's My Sassafrass)
10		Dude (I Totally Miss You)
11		Break In-City (Storm the Gate!)
12		Car Chase City
13		Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown)
14		POD
15		The Metal