Press Yourself: The jauntiest lads in all of Britpop?

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.

The bigger Coldplay gets, the more frontman Chris Martin wants his massive fan base to believe he's a weighty dude, burdened with massive moods, profound philosophical musings, and old-timey war uniforms. But if slick and brooding is the new standard for pop stars from the British Isles, Glasgow's Travis isn't entirely following suit. As lead Travis songwriter Fran Healy and bandmate Andy Dunlop prepared a back-catalog-mining tour of North America--which comes to the Majestic Theatre on Friday--did they send out a promotional poster full of space-age melancholy? Nope, they made flyers like this, in the fashion of an old-school fight advertisement:

Courtesy Majestic Theatre

Note that it promises "laugh-out-loud stories, Scottish accents, handsome Scottish men, naked torsos." Perhaps the lesson here is that once your band has weathered several waves of fussy young Britpop lads and mopey singles, you can feel a lot more comfortable just lightening up. Travis has been a part of those waves, but singles like "Sing" usually didn't get too bogged down in self-seriousness. It's a nice surprise, just like any big-name show flyer that does something other than pick tidbits of praise from the shit-eating grin of the music press. It's the same feeling we get watching a dour dinner party turn into a food fight in the "Sing" video: