Tenacious D’s One-Note Poke at Culture of Excess Falls Short

Picture a pair of sloppy couch potatoes wielding their acoustic guitars as if they were full-blown guitar gods, whipping off absurdly self-important ballads, spewing gangsta-rap curses and hammering out ‘70s hard-rock excesses--and you might think Tenacious D was funny.

Indeed, this duo comprising actors Jack Black and Kyle Gass had much of Sunday night’s Billboard Live crowd howling at their unfocused, sub-Spinal Tap shtick, often drawn straight from their short films for HBO, which revolve around Tenacious D’s delusion that it’s “the greatest band on earth.”

However, this ridiculing of rock-star ambitions in two colossal losers was the hour-plus set’s only joke, and it was pretty much stillborn. The parody lacked a point and rambled horribly, padded with haphazard intrusions that contributed nothing but chaos. There was a glimmer of potential with the duo’s spoof of “Crossroads”-style music legends, but mostly this inept burlesque proved that, even for professionals, playing the pop fool isn’t as easy as it looks.

Opening quintet Guadaloop offered 45 minutes of intriguing trip-hop that distinctly recalled the sensual grooves of Portishead, though not as introverted and a bit more kitschy. The songs were sometimes most memorable for borrowing Soul Coughing’s toy-instrument sounds or cadging a Chemical Brothers beat, but front-woman Pinky Villandry’s powerful, eccentric vocalizing sold them well.