When reviewing Bayonne’s 2016 album Primitives, PopMatters described how “If Debussy and Phil Collins fell in love, Bayonne would be their baby. (That’s a good thing.)” The allusion remains apt. The Texan multi-instrumentalist has continually cited adult pop-rock luminaries such as Phil Collins and Enya, and that fascination with expansive, polished pop remains present on Bayonne’s fourth album, Filters. Yet Bayonne doesn’t simply recreate the sounds of the 1980s. He filters them—appropriately enough—through the loop-based production techniques of contemporary bedroom pop.
On Filters, as with much of Bayonne’s music, the dominant instrumental pairing is a resonating piano accompanied by vibraphone. The piano has a mist-like quality, while the vibraphone’s chiming overtones fall around it like raindrops. Rain becomes a recurring presence throughout Filters, with synthetic rain pads joined by field recordings captured during invigorating hiking trips. The resulting textures occasionally recall the brightness of Joe Jackson’s Latin-tinged percussive piano playing, while the sumptuous, enveloping production evokes the spacious ambition of mid-period Talk Talk.
Bayonne‘s voice is even more delicate than the music surrounding it. Slight and nasal, it recalls Mark Hollis, though where Hollis could sometimes disappear into Talk Talk’s arrangements, Bayonne’s voice rises airily above them. His music is less about a singer standing in front of an arrangement than a musician inhabiting an environment of his own construction.
“Unexpected”, the portentously titled opener, establishes that environment immediately. Gently strummed acoustic guitars and resonating piano gradually build into a lush soundscape, joined by vibraphone, woody marimba, and the airy glissandos of a harp. Throughout Filters, synthesizers provide further colour, while in “January” the pedal steel guitar emerges so organically that it goes almost unnoticed, its pitch-bending lending it the same celestial quality as the harp.
It is an impressive demonstration of Bayonne’s multi-instrumentalism, but also an illustration of the peculiarities of making music this way. The arrangements are so seamlessly integrated that I occasionally wondered where the physical performance ends and the technology begins. Is Bayonne actually playing the harp? Is it a session musician? Or a virtual instrument?
That tension is particularly interesting because Filters is at its most compelling when its immaculate surface begins to crack. For example, an oscillating synthesizer on “Unexpected” is intermittently warped by digital pitch-bending, evoking the memory of a cassette tape being chewed up by rotating spools. As the album’s most dramatic track, “Alone For Now”, concludes, a galloping tom-tom beat (played by Matt Toman, who drums throughout) gradually rises until the recording exceeds the gain threshold, disintegrating amid cavernous echo. These moments of apparent malfunction are among the record’s most exciting precisely because they introduce resistance into an otherwise perfectly controlled environment.
This may be Filters‘ central paradox. Bayonne is exceptionally good at making disparate textures coexist. Piano and vibraphone, synths and field recordings, harp and pedal steel—everything sits together with remarkable harmony, but occasionally I wanted one of those elements to refuse to cooperate. A blue note. A dissonant chord. A key change that feels like an accident rather than an arrangement.
Perhaps this is where the Phil Collins influence becomes most revealing. Collins’ records may share Bayonne’s appetite for polished production and expansive pop textures, but the personalities of the musicians around him also shaped them. A full band can introduce creative friction simply because no two players will respond to an idea in precisely the same way.
Bayonne‘s method offers almost the opposite possibility. He can conceive, perform, and arrange most of his musical world himself, giving him an extraordinary degree of control. That control is the source of Filters‘ beauty, but also, at times, its limitation. The loops and layers harmonize so completely that the music can feel less like a group of musicians responding to one another and more like a single consciousness constructing an ideal sonic environment.
There is something distinctly contemporary about this. Bayonne takes the sophisticated pop of the 1980s and rebuilds it using a compositional language descended from sampling, looping and hip-hop production. If the phrase “sophisti-hop” sounds facetious, the idea behind it is not: Filters demonstrates how the lushness of adult pop can coexist with the modular logic of modern bedroom production.
Ultimately, Filters is an undeniably pleasing record, and often an astonishingly detailed one. Its textures are sumptuous, its arrangements imaginative, and its production pristine without becoming sterile. Yet its most memorable moments are those that threaten that perfection. Bayonne has demonstrated how much one musician can now build alone. The intriguing question is what might happen if something, or someone, pushed back.