The Kyle Gass Band: The Kyle Gass Band

Hairless half of Tenacious D goes it alone.

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Comedy rock is a tough genre to succeed in. Even if the gags are hilarious, if the music’s little more than a flimsy afterthought, no one’s going to give it more than a couple of listens. But Kyle Gass has the impressive CV entry of being the balder, even chubbier half of Tenacious D alongside Jack Black, so we already have high hopes for his solo debut.

It’s most effective when they combine chunky slices of southern rock-lite with wry, blackly comic lyrics, as on Manchild, which boasts ‘All my bills are overdue but I can play a mean kazoo.’

Better still is the country-rock romp of Bro Ho, dedicated to a paramour with some appealingly blokeish traits. ‘She fulfils my desires after we’ve watched a bit of MacGyver… she even likes the films of Martin Scorsese.’ Then again, he adds, ‘She lets one loose right after eating some beans.’

An acquired taste, then, but its heart is in the right place./o:p

Johnny Sharp
Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.