Local band celebrates release of first album


Kel Trent

JP’s The Points North will release the group’s first full-length recording with a show at First Church in Jamaica Plain on Oct. 1.

The Points North’s “I Saw Across The Sound” is the product of the 18 months Chris North Alspach, Regina Peterson and Dylan Clark have spent playing together—contemplating their location in the Eastern Seaboard’s northernmost major city, connecting with local literary traditions and interpreting their rural central Massachusetts childhoods. On “I Saw Across The Sound,” vocal harmonies, flute melodies and bass drum thumps carry the listener through 12 New England ghost-country folk songs.

Jamaica Plain residents, The Points North members met in rural Pennsylvania in summer 2007, when Clark, Peterson and Alspach played a show there together as members of Tiger Saw and St. Joe Hazelwood, in the midst of respective summer tours. The members connected when it was revealed that all were raised in central Massachusetts. Months later, back home in New England, a new group was formed.

Since their first show in Cambridge in winter 2008, The Points North have played hundreds of shows throughout the Northeast. including house venues, art spaces, rock clubs and recently at Harvard Square’s legendary Club Passim. To support the release of their first full length, The Points North are currently planning a string of dates around the US, Canada and Australia.

Thursday’s show starts at 7 p.m. at First Church in Jamaica Plain Unitarian Universalist at 6 Eliot St. by the Monument. Friends and fellow JP residents The Needy Visions and Gracious Calamity open the show. Admission is $8, and each entrant receives a copy of the vinyl LP.

The writer is a Jamaica Plain resident.

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