Press Yourself: Diversify your aftertaste
The whole point of flyers, posters, and publicity photos is to attract attention to yourself and/or your event. We at The A.V. Club go through dozens of these things a week, and it's true that some are better than others. In Press Yourself, we reward clever, gimmicky, and/or offensive promotional tactics by highlighting them.
For a while there, Karl in Sling Blade was the only figure in entertainment advocating for the simple joys of canned meat. Luckily for dead animals sealed inside metal coffins, a group of feisty young entrepreneurs from Iowa City is putting a fresh new face on the product for a whole new demo. The Human Aftertaste, playing Saturday at Inferno, is not just a band and performance-art troupe but a budding media and processed-flesh empire. In fact, the Taste is so confident in its flagship product that at least twice in the past few years, it's mailed members of the local press cans of the stuff, proudly emblazoned with the slogan "EAT OUR MEAT" and a drawing of some voluptuous hag licking it off her lips. This most recent shipment even came with plastic utensils, further daring (OK, defying) us to dig in.
The band's stage personas include a boisterous sketch-hound named Count Jabula and an androgynous ballerina-type, er, being named Protus. This band laughed in the face of kitsch-fatigue a few years ago when, in addition to taking the act on the road, they launched an entire sitcom based around these characters and the product. While we've yet to take a can opener to one of Human Aftertaste's units, we must congratulate this outfit for looking beyond the tour van and staying on-message.
