The Welcome Wagon are the Reverend Vito Aiuto and his wife, Monique: They live in Brooklyn and head Resurrection Presbyterian Church, a young, community-minded congregation that meets every Sunday. The duo's debut album, Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, is a collection of intricate Christian folksongs designed to inspire vigorous clap-alongs and, perhaps, the occasional glaze-and-sniffle. Recorded, engineered, mixed, and designed by Sufjan Stevens (he also wrote the liner notes, released it on his label, Asthmatic Kitty, and contributes banjo, bass, drums, electric and acoustic guitar, percussion, piano, ukulele, and vocals), Welcome to the Welcome Wagon sounds-- yup-- an awful lot like a Sufjan Stevens album: rich, almost childlike vocal harmonies, gentle banjo strums, and elaborate orchestral arrangements coalescing into something warm, layered, and instantly familiar.
Given Stevens' role in the album's conception and creation, a comparison to his own back catalogue might seem facile, but it's also hopelessly true (even Vito Aituo's soft, nudging pipes sound awfully similar to Stevens' own). Still, Stevens isn't employed as a songwriter-- aside from covers of the Velvet Underground's "Jesus" and the Smiths' "Half a Person", Vito Aiuto is credited with composing most of the music, occasionally borrowing lyrics from old sermons or hymns (or, in the case of "Sold! To the Nice Rich Man", from Daniel Smith of Danielson and Danielson Famile), and he and Monique trade off on lead vocals, backed, always, by a crew of pretty, plaintive crooners.
A mix of original illustrations and images snatched from "funeral cards and vacation bible school paraphernalia," the album's artwork is deliberately and unapologetically cloying, and skillfully evokes the silk rose-covered toilet paper basket aesthetic of your grandmother's bathroom. But that's kind of the point: The entire project is impeccably stylized, from the soft-focus colored pencil drawings of children clutching bibles to the Aiutos' own real life pastor-and-his-wife mythology. There are plenty of winks at ageless bible kitsch (see the blue-suited, Ken-haired pastor on the album's back cover, accompanied by the text "Why does our pastor preach from the BIBLE in our church?", or the toddler in a yellow shirt, pointing at, duh, his Bible) but Welcome to the Welcome Wagon is nothing if not earnestly rendered. Stevens admits that most of these tracks were recorded in apartments, and they have the scrappy, church-choir feel of people sitting around, singing together. Maybe eating sandwich cookies in between takes.
And while Welcome to the Welcome Wagon might not be unprecedented, exactly, it does contain a slew of truly great songs: "But for You Who Fear My Name"-- written by Lenny Smith, father of Daniel and the grand-patriarch of the Famile-- is a deliciously light stomp-and-clap folk song, with a squiggly electric guitar line and perfectly metered lyrics about salvation. "American Legion", one of the less explicitly religious songs here, is a sweet, heartfelt love song ("I still have the last letter you left for me, all your t-shirts, your red and green pedigree, all the rest is sealed up behind memory," Vito whispers), while opener "Up on a Mountain", sung predominantly by Monique-- whose voice is beautifully, improbably innocent-- is both terrifying and lulling (when she sings "It's a long way down," you'll be inclined to believe her).*
Welcome to the Welcome Wagon* feels a bit like a pet-project (check that full-color picture of Svengali Stevens, wearing a Michigan hat and holding a microphone!), but it's also endearing and sweet (despite the copious Biblical blood shed therein), and, most important, as addictive as anything: Like any good folk record, these tracks lodge in your subconscious, reemerging while you're chopping potatoes for dinner, tugging on your mittens, or curling into bed. And you'll like it that way.
