By Daniel Buono, News Staff

There’s a new group of space cowboys in town, and it’s no surprise, they’re named N.A.S.A.
The brains behind N.A.S.A., or North America/South America, are Squeak E. Clean and D.J. Zegon, who collaborated with musicians for their cultural hodgepodge of a debut record, called The Spirit of Apollo.
The record is a combination of North American artists’ vocals with South American beats. It took five years to complete, and includes over 30 performers.
The introduction track is a production by itself because of all the editing involved. It is composed from a bunch of spliced together news reports and voiceovers that deliver a message: ‘This is our goal / to show through these mediums / that we are all one race.’
Two standout tracks are ‘Strange Enough’ and ‘Whachadoin?’ the former featuring fierce Yeah Yeah Yeahs front woman Karen O and the late hip-hop artist Ol’ Dirty Bastard (ODB). The chorus is sung completely by O, for an effect that is solemn and mesmerizing when juxtaposed with ODB’s gritty lyrics.
Meanwhile, ‘Whachadoin?’ features M.I.A. and Santigold. A combination of repetitive beats and catchy cell phone beeps in the background make this a potential dance track, while M.I.A. repeats the hook, ‘You like / You like / You like, whachadoin? / All the girls call my house.’
The album is cohesive in that all the tracks lead into one another, a continuity that doesn’t let the listener relax between tracks. Instead, listeners can slow down in the middle of slower songs like ‘O Pato’ or ‘Four Rooms Earth View,’ which are both composed of robotic sounds and pre-recorded space messages.
The ‘The N.A.S.A. Anthem,’ the album’s final track on the album, lets the listener know the show is complete as an announcer states, ‘Some way those two Americans stepped on the moon / the people of this world were brought closer together.’