PR Flacks Hurtses My Brains,
Some select lines from the press release that accompanied my advance of an album by a new group called The Wreckers (Primary claim to fame: Michelle Branch is one of 'em.):
Stand Still, Look Pretty, is one of this year's most anticipated releases that is anchored on amazing harmonies, musicianship, songwriting and common goals.
Amongst the greater pantheon of albums that aren't anchored on amazing harmonies, musicianship, songwriting and common goals, though, nobody is thinking about it much at all. Don't even get me started on the random insertion of a comma. Why couldn't they have saved that comma for any one of the half dozen other places in this release where the comma is missing?
The enclosed bio explains how the girls met and created this incredible bond initially through their music and now goes well beyond their music into their daily lives.
The girls now goes well beyond their music?
The first single and video is "Leave the Pieces" which is a conversational song about how to handle an elusive love to "Crazy People" a tongue and cheek take not being able to find the right lover, as well as completely solid stories about finding love your way in "The Good Kind" to an ode to a lover's reflections in "Tennessee" to the profundity of the title cut, "Stand Still, Look Pretty".
This appears to be a very long sentence. Until you read it a couple of times and realize that it is, in fact, a very long sentence fragment. It does not appear to contain a main clause. The first bit is trying hard to be one, but the structure of the whole suggests it's really meant to be a subordinate part of a 'from X to Y, this album is great' structure.
Branch and Harp enlisted the best of the best to play the chess masters of the board that worked along side of them to help deliver this body of heart and soul.
This sentence does not contain a explicit error in grammar. However, I started to count the mismatched cliches, and my brain exploded.
I mean, for heaven's sake, they're sending this shit out to writers. Writers they hope will take the CD seriously. Writers who know where commas are supposed to be, and where, they're not, supposed, to b,e.
That said, the album isn't bad. Just the damned press release.