SHAMAN

This album vety much continues the highly successful formula of Supernatural, which went 15 times Platinum and won 9 Grammy awards. So given that, if Carlos Santana wanted more money, why stray from the formula? Carlos assembled many famous pop, hip and rap artists to feature on this album. While the Latin influence hasn't disappeared, if you're hoping to hear something dangerous and exciting here, you will find, as I did, this album falls flat on it's face in that department. But given Supernatural was hardly better, I'm not surprised.

I am not really familar with any of the featured artist, in terms of their music anyway, and the only artist I had heard of prior to listening to this album was P.O.D. The album has some very nice lead guitar, which I expected from someone of Carlos Santana's ability. Unfortunately, he is often overshadowed by the featuring artist/s and it is only when we hear a guitar lick from Carlos that we are reminded he is still there. The guest vocalist on Why Don't You & I, Chad Kroeger, has this annoying quality to his voice I can't describe well enough in words, but chances are you will know what I mean if you listen to it. Fortunately, some of the other singers, like Michelle Branch, have nice voices. But that won't save this album from being poorly conceived and a general mess. And when I said highly successful formula I obviously didn't mean that is was successful in the musical sense.

Santana need to take a long hard look at themselves, and really need to see they should have quit while they were ahead. I cannot recommend this album to anyone unfortunately, if you want to hear good Santana, go to an earlier time in their discography.