Canter Bridge

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I remember the first time I heard Point of Grace. The experience came though a set of headphones in the music section of a Medford, Oregon, department store. I had no idea that female vocalists today could sing such tight harmony with such a driving beat (upon occasion). I was sold.

Free to Fly is the 2001 offering of a mature Point of Grace girls band and at once a paean to the production skills of Brown Bannister. I do not think I have heard a more superbly produced cd in any genre anywhere. One goes into repeat listening of a four-female format with a bit of trepidation. In the context of repeated, close listening, it is not the easiest format on the ears. Yet Free to Fly comes at you time after time, repaying with fresh nuance each additional listening experience.

These voices are so tightly interwoven that with each new hearing one picks up new flourishes and glimpses subdued supporting vocals that somehow had passed unnoticed. This is a symptom of music well made.

The energy they inject into New Zealand songstress Darlene Zschech’s ‘Praise Forevermore’ raises it from a garden-variety praise & worship tune to that of a potently artful showstopper. The verbal riff at 1’48” could blow a man’s collar inside out. The voice-to-voice handoff that proceeds it has become a Point of Grace signature, done time and again without descending into cliché.

The album’s high point is ‘Blue Skies’, a soaring piece with surprises in each stanza. The credal statement ‘Yes, I Believe’ is also a poignant and artistically sophisticated statement of simple conviction and its enduring power. Yet if one mentions these two, it it impossible to leave uncommended the beautiful and humble ‘La, La, La’, a song that delves much deeper into the waters of Christian spirituality than its title, prima facie, suggests.

‘Begin with Me’ out to have won a Grammy or a Dove or at least a really large Milkbone for its no-holds-barred arrangement and tight layering. It is awesome listening, as much on the thirteenth hearing as on the first. Perhaps even more on the thirteenth. As opposed to Christian music’s Achille’s Heel, this music gets better with time.

The four ladies of Point of Grace are what one used to call ‘handsome ladies’. They sing and look superb from every angle from which this album allows us to peer into the reality of a girls’ band that was – at this pinnacled moment – an inestimably fine group of human beings who happened to be musicians.