If you haven’t heard about the debut album Spirit of Apollo from N.A.S.A. yet, you totally will. Six years in the making, here’s a hip-hop album that has stars all over the place and it’s not just some shoddy mess. The stars are a crazy diverse batch, yet the thing really works! The first single alone (“Money”) has David Byrne, Chuck D, Seu Jorge, Ras Congo and Z-Trip on it. And the song we’re linking to above, “Whatchadoin?,” has Spank Rock, M.I.A., Santogold and Nick Zinner, along with a clever use of old school phone tones — all on just the one damn song. The surprise is how good it sounds, how uncluttered and unpretentious. This is no We Are The World style clusterfuck, dudes.

Best of all, as someone on a mailing list I’m on pointed out, there is no AutoTune on the album, anywhere (not even on Tom Waits’ contributions). That is a sweet, welcome change. All that vocoderized/ AutoTuned-out shit sounds so blinged-out and out of date — like bottle service — all of a sudden, you know? That stuff’s totally I-banker jamz. In the current economic situation, we need something real and relatively unadorned. Something a bit more broke-ass… but hopeful! Enter N.A.S.A., the partnership between “two lifelong music aficionados,” who call themselves Squeak E. Clean ad DJ Zegon, and one of them is Spike Jonze’ brother or something. One listen, though, and any issues about artistic credibility are thrown out the window.

—DJ Yeti

Loudcrowd’s Pick of the Week: N.A.S.A.