N.A.S.A
The Spirit Of Apollo
Anti/Shock
Hip-hop’s love of appending “featuring...” to the end of the title of any given track is taken to the extreme on this, the debut album for Pan-American production duo N.A.S.A.
The Spirit of Apollo was five years in the making, and it appears that N.A.S.A – comprising Squeak E Clean (aka Spike Jonze’s brother) and Brazilian DJ Zegon (aka a Brazilian pro skateboarder) – have spent it convincing pretty much anyone and everyone to appear on one of its tracks. The roll call of guest stars on this record has been its main selling point – largely because no-one beyond the Hollywood bar circuit and the Brazilian skateboarding fraternity have heard of its makers – and guaranteed it plenty of column inches.
Not all said inches have contained positive copy, though –
The Spirit of Apollo is rocking a 57% rating on criticism aggregator Metacritic at the moment, and the ever self-important scribes at Pitchfork made quite a splash by slapping it with a 1.6/10. The criticism, inevitably, was that all the guest stars featured made the album a disjointed mess (“these guys were too busy making friends to figure out how to make a beat knock”,
griped the ‘Fork).
There’s certainly a point to be made that such fantasy league collaborations are rarely as appealing on record as they are on paper, and predictably enough
The Spirit of Apollo is a bit of a mixed bag. But it’s not as bad as some of its detractors would have you believe. If you take your focus off who that next famous voice is (Tom Waits? David Byrne? Karen O?), and just listen to the music as, well, music, you’re left with a fair-to-middling party hip-hop record.
Despite the vastly diverse array of genres from which its protagonists are drawn, the album sounds remarkably homogenised – kinda Jurassic 5/A Tribe Called Quest style up-tempo stuff, with the occasional foray into vaguely Latin beats and/or MIA-ish clattering rhythms. If anything, the problem isn’t that there’s too much going on, but that all things considered, there isn’t really enough. Which is the greatest criticism of this record – how can you make such a diverse range of artists sound so bland?
Tom Hawking