31 March 2021 - Armistice - Mission Bells & City Lights Cry

We are closing this month of nothing but Canadian music the same way we started.

Not just with a band the American audience here had never heard.   I mean, yes, that.  

Wait.  You did figure out the Canadian music thing before now, right?  Every artist I posted in March was Canadian - even the covers.  I was explicitly clear in every post.  EVERY post contained the word "Canada" or "Canadian" - except for the one that contained the word "canadien" and was all in FRENCH.  I spelled the word "favourite" several times.  I pretty much beat you over the head with the damn maple leaf.

Which also brings us back to ending this month exactly like we started. You see, Armistice was a group - a duo, really, comprised of a man from Toronto band Bedouin Soundclash, named Jay Malinowski, and his girlfriend at the time, a Montreal musician named Béatrice Martin.

She is better known by her stage name.

This collaboration was very much has a 60's mariachi band feel, which is very different than the reggae/ska sound of Bedouin Soundclash and the sound (although not the lyrical depth) of the chanson française of Cœur de Pirate (are you happy that I had to write the œ AGAIN?!).   

Jay and Béatrice, while on tour together in 2011, performed a couple of songs on the streets of Paris.  For reasons that will become clear in a minute and you can already guess, I decided to feature their song "City Lights Cry", which also tells a story in mariachi.  The couple clearly had a lot of fun doing this.  

And they were a couple - meeting at the Olympics in 2010 in Vancouver - but when that relationship ended, Armitice persisted long enough for some promotion of their EP, and then they went their separate ways.  Thankfully, the songs didn't die with the relationship, as they have been performed by Cœur de Pirate regularly.  Granted, they don't sound quite as mariachi on a piano.... but the songs still work.