Press Yourself: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The whole point of flyers, posters, merch items, 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.

If you're going to try and get us talking about press releases, we want at least half of our tequila up-front. Now, we're not debating their usefulness, but the writing style contained in most press releases is vile, debased, demeaning to all involved, and the linguistic encapsulation of everything The A.V. Club would like to retch up about its own generation. If the press release is about music, then it's likely to come deep-fried in the devil's own secret recipe of degradation. The memories line our brain-pan like ancient kitty litter, truly. But as with anything in self-promotion, this most wretched of arenas needs only a bit of character to save it. Two local musicians' e-mail blasts promoting different shows this weekend recently reminded The A.V. Club that, since any sane person will look sideways at your release, you might as well inject some humor and/or innocent spirit into it.

Bob Koch, an Isthmus staffer who plays in many Madison bands and writes The Daily Page's fun Vinyl Cave column, plugged his band The Arkoffs' Saturday show with fellow locals Fist City at Mickey's Tavern by emphasizing a distinct lack of pride and portents of drunken disaster (with some help from Fist City member Jim Merett): "Punch rock vs. garbage rock—which will prove trashier? FistCity and The Arkoffs will alternate mini-sets at Mickey's Tavern on Saturday, Dec. 19, a practice which is likely to allow each band enough free time to inadvertently become trashed/smashed/blitzed/blotto/mickeysed/etc. before having to perform their final set."

The release goes on to credit Fist City with "the driving rhythmic face of a misfiring John Deere tractor" and note that "The Arkoffs were declared legally dead in July 2008.... There are new songs, which might even be played at this show if they bother to learn them. Also, they are not on the web, so don't bother looking." Does it really give us a clear sense of what the show will sound like? No, but we'll take that over some flack comparing a client to Led Zeppelin doing jello shots with John Denver any day.

Exhibit Two is a tad less tongue-in-cheek, but still soars above the stream of "FOR FANS OF ARCADE FIRE" mouth-breathing that floods our inboxes daily. Madison sax player JoAnne Powers sent us a press release about her Friday-night show at Mother Fool's, at which she and a couple other musicians will mark the winter solstice with a session of improvised jazz. But the plug assures us this won't be a night of seasonal-affective wallowing: "The incalcitrant fire of these formidable improvisors provides the energy for a final, stubborn challenge to the encroaching winter," Powers writes. Something tells us that fire would be more than enough to disintegrate all these one-sheets littering our desk.