I've done a better job this year of updating the Aiding & Abetting archives. It's not a difficult job, really. All I have to do is take the reviews from the monthly issues and add them to their corresponding files (organized alphabetically) in the archives. Not difficult, but mind-numbing to the extreme. Nonetheless, I'm all caught up through this year (which is good for me).

One thing I noticed in this most recent update was that I reviewed Page France's Come, I'm a Lion twice within the space of four months. If you like, read the reviews here. In October 2004 I reviewed the band's self-released version, and then in February I reviewed the version put out by Fall Records (which is the same in all respects).

This is amazing in more than one way. For starters, I generally get more than 200 CDs a month. Most months, I give a full-length review to 12 to 16 of those. For me to pick the same album out of such big piles astonishes me, quite frankly. More interesting is that my two reviews are so similar, even though I wrote the second one without any knowledge of the first.

I'd like to think that this episode shows that criticism is a skill, and that I'm pretty good at it. I'm consistent in what I like, how I describe music and in the application of my "knowledge." The "Page France incident" is a happy one for me.

I am also in the process of digitizing my music collection. I'm getting to the end of the Ds, and so far I've used up almost 134G of space. For those who prefer calendar notation, that's 101 days, 15 hours, 42 minutes and 41 seconds worth of music. Every once in a while, I find a CD that doesn't belong to its case (or vice versa). No problem. I just scan the disc and put it aside until I find the correct case (I'm scanning alphabetically out of boxes and putting the sorted discs into a new set of storage, so there's no way to find an unpacked CD immediately).

Last week, I popped in the Doughnuts Feel Me Bleed for scanning. The Doughnuts were an all-female hardcore band that took its sound to the metallic edge. I liked the band's first EP. And I hated Feel Me Bleed. It sounded nothing like the first album, and in any case, I could've sworn a man was singing. You can read my reviews of the Doughnuts from 1995 and 1997 here. I was so disparaging that someone from the label called (I think it was the owner, but I can't remember for sure) and asked if I was listening to the right album. I read off the label number from the CD itself. Right album. Very weird. But we left it at that and didn't investigate further.

So I popped in Feel Me Bleed, and damned if the Refused's Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent didn't show up from the internet CD Database. As users of iTunes and other programs know, CDDB is the repository of CD information that makes it possible to scan in CDs without typing in all the requisite information for each disc (song names, artist, album title, etc.) Sometimes things get hairy, wires get crossed and the wrong info shows up on the screen. I popped the disc out and then back in. Still the Refused. So I listened to the music. And goddamn if it wasn't the Refused.

I love the Refused (you can read my Refused reviews here). I also like the (International) Noise Conspiracy, which is something of an offshoot. But I didn't knowingly listen to the Refused until 1998--when I was quite certain I wasn't listening to a Scandinavian female hardcore band.

With trepidation, I looked back at my review of Feel Me Bleed. Oh, the horror. I really ripped a new one into the album, calling it "sludgy" and full of "retread riffs." I pissed on the political lyrics, saying they were unoriginal. Then I said the album sounded like a bad version of Earth Crisis. Now, I like Earth Crisis a lot--almost as much as the Refused--so that last bit doesn't bite as much as the others. But man, how could I have been so wrong?

I listened to the album, and I could tell that I'd written my review based entirely on expecting another Doughnuts offering. Didn't give any real thought to a new direction that band might have taken (even though it probably didn't). In short, I royally screwed that one up--even if the CD mispressing wasn't my fault.

If you're curious, the reason for this mistake was simple: the Refused album came out on Victory as well. I don't know why Victory never sent me the Songs--they sent me most everything else they released. But the manufacturer must've pressed a few too many Refused CDs and then painted them up as Doughnuts CDs. This happens more often than you might think. If can remember the days before Beatles albums on CD, the first time a Beatles song was heard on the then relatively-new format was by a Pat Benatar fan. That's right. He wanted "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and he got "She Loves You." If eBay had been around back then, he could've make four or even five figures.

So maybe I'm not (or wasn't) as good a music critic as I thought. It's funny to find an error like that after eight-and-a-half years, even if there's no reason for me to have known I made a mistake. It wasn't my fault, but I still could've done better. A reviewer has to review the album at hand, ignoring all expectations and any other extraneous data. That's impossible, of course, but it's still important to try. I didn't, and I'm a little pissed off at myself about that.

Then again, I've got one more Refused album in my collection. Sometimes when you fuck up, you still win.

Jon Worley is still interested in hearing that Doughnuts album, though he won't stay up nights worrying about it.