(Andy Synn closes out his week here at NCS with a name that hopefully some of you will recognise)
The term “Mandela Effect” refers to a mistaken but widely-held belief – originally that Nelson Mandela died in prison, but also more generally applied to such assertions as “the girl in Moonraker definitely had braces” (she didn’t) or “the Fruit of the Loom logo used to have a cornucopia in it” (nope) – that has entered the public consciousness, blurring the lines between what’s actually true and what we remember as being true.
Sure, some of these instances have a relatively prosaic explanation (it’s been shown several times that a run of knock-off or mis-printed “Fruit of the Loom” shirts did in fact use the alternate logo, but it was never officially put into circulation) but others have been ascribed to anything from “mass psy-op” to “glitches in the matrix”.
Why am I saying all this? Well, Colorado-based groovemongers Mire have their own Mandela Effect going on, because depending on how you remember things Pale Reflection is either their second or their third album.
The reason for this, of course, is that their “first” album, Shed, was taken offline not long after its release – Metal Archives still has it listed on the band’s profile page, and my own review is still online, but otherwise evidence of its existence is relatively sparse (though it can, with a bit of searching, still be tracked down on Spotify) – and its six songs re-recorded as part of the band’s real debut, A New Found Rain, making Pale Reflection actually the band’s first album of totally new material since 2018.
