Are you prepared?

Mental Infestation Sale Coming To An End

Yup, the two year sale is almost up! Make sure you don't miss out on the extremely low prices!

www.cafepress.com/mentalinfest

It's just another manic Monday (but I'm glad it's not Sunday)

So as you've seen, I have started a new tshirt blog which I am hoping will promote some of the best stores on Cafepress (which is the company I sell my tshirts through). But I have also started a new metal related blog called Metaholic Music. This blog is an online fanzine type blog, and there is more than just myself contributing to it. So I think I'm going to be pretty busy with the 3 blogs, my store, working and everything else I need to do. Not complaining though!

What else is happening? Well I found a SWEET band on Myspace last week (when I say found, my mate told me about them, I didn't go out looking for them). They're called SubVerSi0N, and at the moment there are only 2 of them. Their tracks on their profile blew me away. They do sound slightly empty without the bass in there, but once they've got their full line up, I have a feeling these guys are going to go far!

It does make me jealous though. I'd love to be playing in a band again and writing music. I'd love to buy myself a lovely new bass and get practising again and see where it went. But I don't have the cash to do so, so the idea is still sat on a shelf gathering dust for the time being. I guess that's the reason I keep starting up metal groups and blogs as well as continuing on with my street teaming.

Today I'm going to the opticians. My eyesight has got to the stage where I'm squinting at the TV, which is rubbish! So off to Boots we go. I've seen some new specticals I want to buy too, that should match my new purpler hair!

Other than that, I'm gonna have to sort out covering letters. As if writing a CV wasn't hard enough eh? I just can't survive on the poor hours I've been given and being messed around while new people get given more hours than me. Nice to know staff are valued. I may go into a rant about this another time though.

And that's about it from here. Just take a look at the other blogs and let me know what you think!

The Daily Tees

Yesterday I decided to start a new blog to help promote my favourite designs available on Cafepress. The new blog is called The Daily Tees. Each day I will add a new design (at random) which I think is FABULOUS, with pictures and links to the store. I am hoping that this will help to promote some of the best designs available by designers and artists that use Cafepress to sell their t-shirts.

UK Illegal Downloaders Face Internet Ban!

I was sat watching News 24 earlier (it's probably one of the main channels I watch), when I saw this news story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm you may need to read this first for the rest to make sense.

Now, I am one of these terrible people who download music. I am also one of these people who BUY the albums I like after I've downloaded them. I bought so many albums last year by artists I had never heard of before! Threat Signal, Blinded Colony, Edge Of Sanity, Nightrage, even artists I've been listening to for a long time such as In Flames, Soilwork and my favourite band of all, Opeth, I found through downloading!

In fact, if it wasn't for my downloading habits, I doubt I'd be listening to half the bands I listen to today! I wouldn't own the majority of the CDs I own today, and I wouldn't be paying money to see these bands playing or buying their merchandise, because I would probably never would have found them otherwise!

Now I can understand that they're all upset when people download a new Kylie album, which would set you back all of £9.98, but unfortunatly, those of us who don't listen to radio friendly unit shifters (ah, managed to get a Nirvana reference in there) like Kylie, we will be the ones who suffer under this new "3 hits and you're out" proposal. It cost me £15 for my Threat Signal and Edge Of Sanity CDs, and when money is tight, and you don't want to be throwing that kind of cash at just anything, and these small bands on independent labels are REALLY going to struggle!

I'm still angry that metal albums cost so much more than those of more popular artists. I mean surely a CD costs the same to make either way? But I refuse to pay that amount of cash on a hunch I have about a band, before I hear the album! Hell I could be wasting £15 on the biggest amount of crap produced in the 21st Century, and I don't want to keep taking CDs back and swapping them because they're crap, I'll get banned from my own place of work!!!

But that is another rant for another day.

I would love to work out just how much money I have spent on the bands I have downloaded in the past on their CDs, tshirts/hoodies and gig tickets over the years. I'm sure it would add up to a very large amount of money! I mean there are plenty I've found without downloading through music magazines giving away free CDs, or listening to rock shows on the radio, but most of them I have found through downloading.

Even now, I am downloading new music from bands I'd never heard of before, to give them a try. If I like them, I will purchase them, if not, I will delete them. But I'd never heard of Charon or Theatre Of Tragedy until the other day. Theatre Of Tragedy I am pretty sure I will be buying after hearing a few of their tracks, but if I hadn't downloaded them, I would never have heard of them or contemplated buying anything by them.

So here is my little list of bands I have downloaded over the years, which I wouldn't have heard or bought stuff by otherwise. Note: I own CDs by all of these artists, albums I downloaded and others by them that I bought on the strength of the album I bought.

Opeth, In Flames, Soilwork, All That Remains, Threat Signal, Blinded Colony, Fear Factory, Edge Of Sanity, Guano Apes, Rammstein, Alice In Chains, Jerry Cantrell, Mark Lanegan, Tiamat, Scar Symmetry, Terror 2000, Coldseed, Nightrage, Nuclear Blast Allstars, Weezer, Spiritual Beggers, Factory 81, Mr Bungle, Faith No More, 36 Crazyfists, Lacuna Coil, Mad Capsule Markets... that is just a small handful of bands that I can think of off the top of my head. A lot of them I own ALL their albums (or the majority), a few I own their merchandise and quite a number I have seen (or want to see) live.

I don't always download. I do use Myspace a lot to look up bands and have a listen, but I find that a couple of tracks doesn't always show the bands in their best light, and they'll tend to put up tracks from their more recent stuff, or tracks they like a lot, rather than ones that sum up the band/artist as a whole.

If I were to become one of those banned from the internet for downloading music, and people like me who buy what they download and become fans of the bands, the industry will find they have more problems shifting these artists albums. And this in turn will be damaging for up and coming artists and their small independent labels who struggle enough as it is.

Metal Infestation

So you may have discovered from my previous postings, that I am rather fond of metal. No, I don't mean steel or silver! I mean that fantastic genre of music which is sometimes brutal and sometimes rather beautiful.

The problems I have found, since becoming a fan of metal, are the dreaded metal forums!!! I like talking to other metal fans, don't get me wrong, most of my mates are huge metallers, but these forums seem to be filled with over opinionated, elitist, egomaniacs. Now I'm opinionated, so if someone rubs me up the wrong way, I do get rather bitchy. So me in one of these forums = chaos!

Elitism in metal seems to be a big problem I have found over the past 10 years I've been listening. Yup I am fairly new compaired to most, that doesn't mean my opinion is less important than that of someone who's been listening to metal since they were in the womb, and my opinion isn't any more important than someone who's been into it all for six months.

There are a lot of bands which are classed under "nu metal" which a lot of the elitists won't accept as being metal. The Slipknots, Limp Bizkits and Korns of the world. Sure they're not the best bands on the planet, but they're metal whether these people like it or not (I'd rather not class them under metal, even if I do own their albums and am rather fond of Limp Bizkit).

I also hate the people who think their bands are better than yours. Sure I wind people up about their tastes, and I'll tell them they listen to crap metal, but I'm just a big wind up merchant, it's your choice at the end of the day (and if you want to listen to crap, so be it, haha!). I know not everyone has the supreme taste in music I have, but then again, it'd be boring if everyone did listen to the same as me, I'd never get to see the bands I wanted, and I'm sure if my mates didn't listen to different stuff, then I wouldn't discover new music, and that would be pretty dull!

So after one forum too many, fed up of the elitism and the insults (I will throw my horns any which way I like thank YOU very much), I decided I would start my own little metal community on Myspace, which is one where I have to approve people before they join (elitism? No, I just want to keep it free of spammers). It's actually turning into a nice little group, though very quiet at the moment.

Sound ideal? http://groups.myspace.com/MetalInfestation

Musical Phases/The Hunt For New Music

I have a terrible habit of having musical phases. I guess it ties in with the obsessive compulsive I'm sure I mentioned in a previous blog, which runs in my family, but I will go through a phase of listening to certain bands, a certain style or just one singular band. For example, I've been listening to a lot of Opeth, Blinded Colony and Threat Signal recently. Before that, I was between In Flames, Soilwork and Terror 2000, and the other year, I was only listening to industrial bands.

After a few weeks of listening to the same albums over and over, you get a little bit bored. I've been trying to bring in other bands, but I need something totally fresh to break me out of this. I have gone off all my metal at one point in the past and listened to crooner music, Rat Pack/Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin, for a good few weeks!

So I am currently seeking a mixture of bands really. I want to find more doom style stuff, along the same lines as Katatonia, Anathema, Tiamat, Swallow The Sun and Novembre (who have elements of melodeath in them), more melodeath stuff along the same lines as Opeth, Soilwork, In Flames and Blinded Colony, or just some metal which I really should have discovered a long time ago by myself!

I have a Last.FM account, http://www.last.fm/user/mentalinfest, which may help anyone wanting to recommend me some music. I am pretty fussy about vocals. It seems to drive people around the bend when they're recommending me new music! I would have been a big fan of Smashing Pumpkins, for example, if Billy Corgan didn't sound like he was singing through his nose! And I don't like black metal. I can't be doing with the high pitched girly sounding squeely vocals, I like my metal in the same way I like my men... With balls!

So please feel free to leave comments of recommendations for me to check out! I would really appreciate your help in my hunt for new music!

Exercise Books

My granny always used to try to encourage us in our spelling and sums, I'm sure I recall her having exercise books for us at her house (I must be getting old forgetting these things). We certainly had them in school (though we called them "jotters"). They were always so drab, horrible colours with very little on them, apart from "Name:", "Age:", "Class:", and perhaps who made them. You always wanted to cover them with drawings, and you always got in trouble for it!



So I thought, it's about time the "Exercise Book" was revamped. With a little bit of retro creasing effects, these are my newest creations for Mental Infestation! With different colours and designs, I'm hoping these appeal a lot more than those nasty jotters I remember from my youth!



Perfect for drawing, sums or jotting down notes!

The Sacred Metal Festival

I've been to a number of music festivals over the years. Big Day Out in Milton Keynes 1999, Leeds 2000, 2001, 2002 and Download 2004. But in the UK we don't seem to know what a metal festival is!

For the past few years, I've not been festing it up, because there just hasn't been any I've wanted to go to! Well, not in the UK. There are plenty of decent festivals in Europe and North America, and I eye up Wacken with envious green eyes as I see many a band I would just kill to see.

I remember after the Big Day Out they were discussing bringing an Ozzfest like festival to the UK. I was planning on going, but they cancelled it. I'd been waiting a couple of years before Download was first announced! Though I didn't make the first Download, I did get along to the second one. I thought "at last! We have a metal festival in the UK!"

To my horror, this festival has turned slowly more and more soft and dare I say "emo"! Maybe my taste has got a lot heavier in that time, but I still like my softer metal acts like Deftones, Disturbed, Lacuna Coil etc. But when you see the headliners are wimpo bands like Linkin Park (who admitted that they'd only jumped on the "nu-metal" bandwagon cause they saw how big it was getting), My Chemical Romance and a whole array of "past it" acts such as Metallica, Iron Maiden etc as well as one of Corey Taylor's bands, you wonder where proper metal fans will get their festival fix without leaving the UK!!!

I've just been on Kerrang! (or as I more fondly call it, Kerrap!)'s website to see the first acts announced for Download 2008. I just couldn't believe just how bad it is!

The Offspring









Lostprophets








HIM (or should that be Ville Valo and some backing band or another?)












Judas Priest












Oh fantastic! I mean I do own a couple of albums by The Offspring (who I have seen in the past) and one by Lostprophets (their first one), but they've had their day! Judas Priest will make a few people think "ah it's not all bad", but I personally can't stand 80s metal. It oozes cheese! And as for HIM, the less said the better!!!

But then again, I had a feeling it would be yet another rubbish line up. I'm getting used to seeing it. I'm just working out who to put bets on. Slipknot, since they have a new album due this year, or Stone Sour? I think it'll probably be Slipknot this year, am I right Corey?

I lost respect for Slipknot a long time ago, but that is a different story that I may come back to at a later date.

So as my music tastes develope into a somewhat darker and heavier place, away from the hair over one eye pretty boys producing radio friendly, over produced, mind numbing crap for the masses that frequents Kerrang! TV and Scuzz, I find myself looking for something a bit more evil, twisted and altogether more brutal!

BLOODSTOCK!!!

Hell yeah! Finally a festival that has at least a couple of my favourite bands playing. Now, there are a lot of bands on their line up so far that I'm not too keen on, a few I'd never even heard of before, but the line up isn't full yet, plenty of room for more of my favourite acts to sign up!

So far I'm excited about Opeth (well they are my all time favourite band, don't dare say a bad word about them to me), Soilwork and Swallow The Sun. There's a couple of others who look interesting that I will have to check out!

This is a festival which appears to cater to those of us looking for a metal with an edge! Bringing in bands who don't appear in the popular metal magazines, but have loyal fan basis. They even encourage you to suggest bands and vote for bands videos (I'm still hoping they take into consideration my votes and suggestions of Blinded Colony and Smokescreen for Bloodstock 2008).

It's still not the "ideal" festival, it doesn't bring in the middle range bands, the ones who could play both Bloodstock and Download, which would probably bring more people, but I think it's pretty close. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than Download! Cheaper + Better Bands = Hell Yes I'm Going!

Best Selling Design of January 2008!

January was a good month for Mental Infestation! It saw our second year birthday on Cafepress, and sales were above the monthly average!!

This months best seller was an unusual winner. With our sales prodominantly being ecologically friendly designs, I found it rather surprising to see sales of Pyrite go through the roof!!! It's a design which as been up for a while, and it appeared to be a design that had very little interest from customers, until this month!


Pyrite Jr. Ringer T-Shirt, Januarys best selling item.