Welcome to the Welcome Wagon is certainly one of the most unique releases of the season — a husband-and-wife team that uses music to further a spiritual journey they began years ago. Reverend Vito Aiuto and his wife Monique savour the opportunity presented them by producer and arranger Sufjan Stevens to try their hand at various hymns, cover songs and originals that explore religion in a musical context.
Those familiar with Stevens’s work will see his fingerprints all over this one both in the campy song titles and in the compositions themselves. “Sold! To the Nice Rich Man” swirls with the same musical flourishes that colour Stevens’s solo work, while much of the rest of the album subscribes to his singing-by-committee motif. The arrangements are less complex than we’re used to from Stevens, with less instrumentation and simpler time signatures, which allows The Welcome Wagon to ground themselves and their subject matter.
Welcome to the Welcome Wagon is an interesting project, but ultimately unfulfilling. Frustrating, too, as all of the ingredients for a great album are present, and yet there’s an intangible missing somewhere. This causes the album to stall. Maybe it’s the overpowering presence of Stevens the arranger, who renders the Aiutos all but moot to the proceedings.
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