The experimental D.C. duo’s latest album is made up of slabs of textured noise and decayed vocals, but they use their DIY chaos as a radical force against all hierarchies.
Model Home’s music would blend right in with a dystopia. The deteriorating sounds of Patrick Cain’s electronics would be impossible to distinguish from the constant construction that is the score of any contemporary city; NappyNappa’s enigmatic missives would be lost in the roar of public service announcements, personalized advertisements, and omnipresent sirens. Of course, the experimental duo is from Washington D.C., which has always produced bands that reflect the inherent paradox of fighting for freedom in a city pockmarked with monuments to the slave trade. Model Home’s One Year mirrors this conflict; NappyNappa’s urgent spoken word breaks through the waves of Patrick Cain’s synthetic distortion. Built on the edifice of dub sound systems and DIY basement clatter, this monument to a year-long experiment in collective improvisation is made up of slabs of textured noise and decayed vocals.
On the world-weary “Faultfinder,” a woozy number that sounds like it was recorded on a warped tape, Nappy’s vocals expand and shrink to a steady drumbeat. His voice buzzes and squeaks through the haze of a merry-go-round-like melody, yet the fuzz clears when he finds it necessary to deliver a pointed statement of contempt: “Ain’t no equality/Inequality only leveraged to disperse.” Heard through the warbled drum loops, his observations are like futurist road signs. On “Push Thru,” Nappa narrates a series of thoughts he has while riding a bus route in a deranged Auto-Tune: “Just got to have faith in my surroundings/I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.” He manipulates his voice to match the acceleration and deceleration of the percussion; Cain will cut his voice up, slow it down, and hollow it out till it sounds like a voicemail.
This creates the illusion that you are hearing Nappa shout on a soapbox in a city full of automatons, mixing prophetic judgements with dispassionate inquiry in an attempt to wake the dead. On “Grip” Nappa shouts, “Processed prescriptions, polluted perceptions/Dirty lenses makes for a cruddy vision,” balancing biting critique with quotidian observation. His calls for self-actualization are jammed between corrupted drums and satellite blips. You hear his voice attempting to break through the insipid chatter of a digitally distracted society, filled with people convinced that they are communicating through “social media,” while they numb themselves and proudly declare that they are unable to concentrate.
To reduce fuzz around the words would provide a clarity that rings false in an increasingly obfuscated world. So they surround Nappa’s words with clutter, noise, trash. Take “Baya Style,” an ESG-influenced caper lying in the middle of the album; its pots ’n’ pans rhythm and Mantronix production are ’80s boombox material. Feedback propels Nappa’s testimonial—“Buy now, buy now/1-800-Buy Now”—to blurry heights; the squeals his keyboards make cut through Nappa’s words, which are slowly blunted by reverb. The two musicians mutually agree to disappear the false boundary between producer and speaker.
“No Barcode & Boundless” is the final word from this conflict-prone alliance, fusing two songs that appeared on separate mixtapes. “Boundless” comes first, built on a sound that mimics a revving car and Nappa’s mutterings. In the next section, Cain creates a horrorcore atmosphere by lengthening wind-chime notes and dividing them with a snare that comes in at the oddest of intervals, while Nappa swerves from lines about destroying your foes to respecting your mother. In this muck, he delivers his most clear statement of ethics: “No barcode you can’t buy me/I don’t even write cursive so you can’t sign me.” This selection of songs from their catalog is an edited transcript of a vital dialogue. Their music is messy and intoxicating because it was forged in this fire of equity. It’s not possible to ditch long-held identities without conflict and without conversation; often, the latter leads to the former. What NappyNappa and Patrick Cain say is that we should embrace rupture if we ever want to truly partner with each other.
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