N.A.S.A. - The Spirit Of Apollo

Collaborative LPs are, of course, nothing new, but the release of such an affair that achieves a sense of cohesion from track to track is worthy of highlighting.

N.A.S.A. began some six years ago when the pair of DJ Zegon and Sam ‘Squeak E. Clean’ Spiegel combined forces to present a sound rooted in both North America (Spiegel) and South America (Zegon) – hence the name. But neither was up for vocal duties, so drafted in a handful of guests to deliver on said front. And their guestlist grew and grew. And grew.

Guest turns on hip-hop records are as commonplace as drizzle in August and petulance amongst the Premier League’s best paid, with many a single artist’s album peppered liberally with numerous bars of loquacious prose courtesy of Rappers X, Y and Z. But rarely are these tracks more than the work of one with a phoned-in embellishment from a So Hot Right Now sort. N.A.S.A. eschew this formula for an approach that saw the pair jet around the world – Sweden, Hawaii, the Caribbean, New York – to be in the room with their chosen collaborator. As a result ‘The Spirit Of Apollo’ flows with a greater attention to detail than many peer releases.

The first track to go public was ‘Money’, late last year, and it ultimately serves as a neat taster of what’s available in abundance across ‘The Spirit Of Apollo’ – perfectly positioned vocal spurts from rarely-sighted-together artists, sewn into place with a meticulousness relative to such a lengthy gestation period. Here, Chuck D spars lyrically with David Byrne, Ras Congo and Seu Jorge, while Z-Trip provides the old-skool cuts; it runs into the appropriately titled (given its vocalists) ‘Hip Hop’, which marries the talents of KRS-One with those of Fatlip, producing a deliciously retro vibe. So far, so good – out of step with what’s current, and ‘cool’, but undoubtedly in a field of its own and therefore something to celebrate on its singular terms.

As ‘The Spirit Of Apollo’ progresses further team-ups reveal unexpected thrills – the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard gets mashed into the mix alongside Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O for ‘Strange Enough’, a squelching melee of candied cartoon beats sure to get the most reserved nodding an appreciative head. The ‘net-leaked ‘Gifted’ (find it on YouTube) finds Kanye West at his fiery best, the necessity and subsequent pressure to deliver on material bearing his own name alleviated, affording the rapper a freedom to get playful while Santogold gets sultry a little lower in the mix and Swedish chanteuse Lykke Li sounds sexier than she ever did on her debut LP of last year.

The sample-laden instrumentals that serve as segues are perhaps a little out of the quality loop, but allow N.A.S.A.’s core duo to stamp their identity on a project that, at times, dares to wrestle focus away from its founders. You can forgive Zegon and Spiegel the odd lapse of concentrated commitment to the cause given the wealth of fantastic arrangements elsewhere. One other criticism, if you see it as such, is that much of ‘The Spirit Of Apollo’ seems extremely out of touch with a modern music scenes set on celebrating maverick spirits in scene circles – while a remarkable achievement on paper, not every arrangement here can cut it with hip-hop’s greats of the here and now. But that’s to be expected, really – this did take six years to piece together.

While perhaps inconsistent when taken as a whole, ‘The Spirit Of Apollo’ features standouts enough to rank it above similar efforts of years gone by – think the first records by UNKLE and Handsome Boy Modelling School. Additionally, Spiegel and Zegon have displayed a great deal of TLC in working the whole into a form that works almost as well as an A-to-Z album as it does a random-play house party mix-tape. Almost.

Read our exclusive interview with N.A.S.A. HERE