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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Some Great Songs, Some Clunkers, July 23, 2002
There are some very fine songs on this album. Unfortunately, they are mixed in with some of the weaker songs Sanatana has ever released. The album starts out with the classic Dance Sister Dance, which has a great melody, good vocal, and fantastic guitar solo. The band is very hot on this tune, and it delivers on the promise of making you want to stand up and dance. The second song, an instrumental, is also very fine, particular near the end when the band cools down a few notches and moves into a skating jazz groove that creates a kind of euphoric high in this listener. The third song, Let Me, starts out with a 5 star rating performance from the rhythm section. The guitar comes in, and the quality drops to a 4, which is still very good. The rest of the band joins and the tune finds its cliche groove, which is about a 3 quality. Then the vocals start and the song drops to a 2. The vocals sound to me like a cliche ridden attempt to imitate James Brown or Sly Stone. Or maybe to imitate their imitators. It ends up being a clunker. Gitano starts with a pretentious and poorly executed flaminco guitar solor including lots of buzzing guitar strings. But the tune itself is hot and contains some great vocals, great melody, and a great beat. It's very interesting to hear how Carlos' guitar playing improves the moment the song finds its groove. The guy is fantastic when he has a good groove, which is what Santana is all about. Tell Me Are You Tired is so bad I can no longer listened to it all the way through. Europa is fantastic, a classic Santana soaring guitar melody and solo. Tom Costers' organ is not up to Carlos's guitar solo, but all in all it is a classic cut, among his best. I don't think I've ever made it all the way through the...melody of Let It Shine... It might work live if you were in a really, really good mood, but overall it is just too silly even for this lover of Santana's euphoric, good groove songs.... If you want to put the album on and listen to it all the way through, you might have some serious regrets about buying it. This is not one of the albums where Carlos falls apart altogether. It has some of his best music on it. It's just that the good is mixed in with some of his worst.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Before the Fall, November 8, 2002
Although Amigos is a strong album, you can hear, in the weaker tracks, the beginnings of Santana's decline. Having followed his classic trilogy of Latin Rock albums with three quasi-jazz-fusion albums, Santana wanted to come back down to Earth and rediscover his pop roots. He was mostly successful on Amigos, but subsequent albums fell off dramatically in quality as he continued to flounder in search of the right middle-of-the-road groove.However, on Amigos, the superb material is more than worth the purchase price of the CD. Dance Sister Dance and Gitano showcase a new facet of Santana's Latin roots, and Europa is probably Santana's finest composition, featuring his most powerful and moving guitar work. Let It Shine is an OK rhythm & blues pop song that became the minor hit Santana was looking for. Tell me are you tired is the worst track on the album, a dopey "lecture" song that, regrettably, was a harbinger of things to come. It's worth buying this record for "Europa" alone, since none of the live performances I've heard come close to matching the studio original for shimmering, sparkling beauty and emotional resonance. As a whole this is a solid piece of work and at the current budget price is well worth it for any Santana fan.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
OK but on the downturn, May 22, 2002
Amigos features two solid instrumentals, the most noteworthy being "Europa," one of Carlos' trademark guitar works. Starting with pretty high-pitched twangs, it evolves into a potent solo in the Santana tradition. The group also displays its musical talents well in "Take Me With You." For the rest (except for an interesting flamenco intro on "Gitano"), Amigos represents the beginning of the slippage from Santana's top-notch studio album work that began after Borboletta and has continued to this day (with the exception of the studio cuts on Moonflower, released shortly after Amigos). Tom Coster's keyboards are radiant enough, and Armando Peraza still does it with his bongos and conga, but the song quality and overall instrumentation do not measure up to the old standards. They reflect a shift to more-plain-sounding or less-refined Latin verselines and music or so-so funk, to later become mediocre at best. It should also be noted that "Europa" and "Take Me With You" are somewhat derivative of "Samba Pa Ti" and "Incident at Neshabur," respectively, hinting that the great Mexican guitarist's inspiration was beginning to wane. Amigos is still decent, if unimpressive, but the latter term can in no way be linked to Santana's earlier works, and he was never again able to produce anything good except on a sporadic basis.
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