The Welcome Wagon
Welcome To The Welcome Wagon
2009 Asthmatic Kitty
Music by couples can be immediately discarded by critics and listeners for its immediate preciousness, but this is based in some sort of macho or bohemian assumption that marriage or commitment is anathema to creative freedom, and posited by folks who probably don't know what kind of intense dynamic intense commitment is. If there is was ever a source of creative tension, there is one in relationship.
The Welcome Wagon is a husband and wife (Vito and Monique) pastor team in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and though one cannot first find the tension located in their tunes, it turns out to be located in terms of spiritual tension, between what we assume to be the divide between heave and earth, often enhanced by spiritual music.
With the Welcome Wagon we find that tension erupting in the warm glow of these rooted in daily life and work tunes colliding with a sense of traditional hymn modes and provincial spiritual folk songs. The music is very innocent in its simplicity and happiness, and can tend to feel bubbly in the front half of the record a bit. This brightness is well balanced by the second half, where "I Am A Stranger" marks the albums strongest point, finding a strong, dark musical backing to a heavy story of finding the divine in the shattered earth's milieu. The manic guitar solos under the aching choir feels like a Southern dirge and moonshine-jam filling a Brooklyn meeting hall, full of fear and trembling, cascading into a chaos-jam under the words "everything's alright, yes, everything's alright..."
The album's production by Sufjan Stevens certainly feels akin to his own work at times, more than others ("Hail To The Lord's Anointed" could be a Seven Swans outtake, and that is a good thing), the record still develops a folky sense that sets it apart from the more chamber-worthy Glassisms of Sufjan's work. However, Vito's quiet tenor is a dead-ringer for Sufjan's (who sings at times also).
When much liturgical music is either aping U2 endlessly in energetic, but mega-hyped anthems, or retreating into lovely but inscrutable ancientness, The Welcome Wagon offer a pretty compelling branch of style, with well thought lyrics that do not speak down to a congregation's intelligence, but still enact a very humble interaction with the Holy, lacking pretense, and full of joy with sorrow, how the Gospel appears.
Welcome To The Welcome Wagon
2009 Asthmatic Kitty
Music by couples can be immediately discarded by critics and listeners for its immediate preciousness, but this is based in some sort of macho or bohemian assumption that marriage or commitment is anathema to creative freedom, and posited by folks who probably don't know what kind of intense dynamic intense commitment is. If there is was ever a source of creative tension, there is one in relationship.
The Welcome Wagon is a husband and wife (Vito and Monique) pastor team in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and though one cannot first find the tension located in their tunes, it turns out to be located in terms of spiritual tension, between what we assume to be the divide between heave and earth, often enhanced by spiritual music.
With the Welcome Wagon we find that tension erupting in the warm glow of these rooted in daily life and work tunes colliding with a sense of traditional hymn modes and provincial spiritual folk songs. The music is very innocent in its simplicity and happiness, and can tend to feel bubbly in the front half of the record a bit. This brightness is well balanced by the second half, where "I Am A Stranger" marks the albums strongest point, finding a strong, dark musical backing to a heavy story of finding the divine in the shattered earth's milieu. The manic guitar solos under the aching choir feels like a Southern dirge and moonshine-jam filling a Brooklyn meeting hall, full of fear and trembling, cascading into a chaos-jam under the words "everything's alright, yes, everything's alright..."
The album's production by Sufjan Stevens certainly feels akin to his own work at times, more than others ("Hail To The Lord's Anointed" could be a Seven Swans outtake, and that is a good thing), the record still develops a folky sense that sets it apart from the more chamber-worthy Glassisms of Sufjan's work. However, Vito's quiet tenor is a dead-ringer for Sufjan's (who sings at times also).
When much liturgical music is either aping U2 endlessly in energetic, but mega-hyped anthems, or retreating into lovely but inscrutable ancientness, The Welcome Wagon offer a pretty compelling branch of style, with well thought lyrics that do not speak down to a congregation's intelligence, but still enact a very humble interaction with the Holy, lacking pretense, and full of joy with sorrow, how the Gospel appears.
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