Customer Reviews

Amigos

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Dance Sister Dance: a perfect mix between a latin groove and a pop/rock song. The final part, which is played in double time, work toward a climax. Strange but effective contrast between slow and dreamy guitar lines and cooking drums underneath. Santana's trademark sustained guitar note at the end of his blends almost imperceptibly into Tom Coster's string part - played on a vintage Solina of before the polyphonic synth era. Coster's Minimoog lines - apparently influenced by Jan Hammer - are sparse (much more so than on the live version on Moonflower) but very effective; the keyboard playing is first rate on the whole album. Take Me With You is a high energy jazzrock tune in 6/8 with a brief allusion to African 12/8 polyrhythmic bell patterns. Wailing guitar and Hammond solos, followed by an slower, cha cha-like epilogue which might be corny if it weren't for Carlos' subtle guitar statements. Gitano is an Afro-Cuban tune with a flamenco-like Spanish guitar intro (quite unlike the guitar playing in Cuban son). Sounds pretty Cuban/Puerto Rican though once the main groove starts, with authentic tumbao, anticipated bass timing, everything. Armando Peraza has just the right voice for this kind of tune. Tell Me Are You Tired is an uncharacteristic Santana song; again, a change of tempo in midsong, kind of an in-the-pocket funk groove (with Hohner Clavinet). Great jazzy Fender Rhodes solo by Coster. Europa hardly needs an introduction; a classic instrumental in the tradition of Samba Pa Ti, but more smoothly executed. More of Carlos' famous sustain. Finally, Let Me and Let It Shine are entertaining tunes, but not much more than that. Still, there is so much to enjoy in the other songs that they are sufficient to make the album worthwhile.

I'm sorry, but I don't think Santana ever gets the respect that he deserves. He has stood the test of time and his longevity and extensive body of work speak for themselves. He is the premier pioneer in latin rock. I agree that not all of the songs on "Amigo" are stand out tracks, but Gitano, Europa and Dance sitster Dance are easily worth the price of this album.I appreciate good latin music and those 3 songs are outstanding! Europa inspired me to play guitar as I've spent many hours learning that song-and believe me, I'm no Carlos Santana on the guitar. All-in-all I have great memories of this album and I wish people appreciated the Greatess of this latin legend

I KNEW from "Santana III" that the Santana Band always had a little of the funk in 'em but on "Amigos" it all blasts out from
the grooving "Tell Me Are You Tired" and the Stevie Wonder-like
"Let It Shine".On "Take Me With You" Carlos's guitar blisters
every funky lick while "Dance Sister Dance" is a luscious latin
groove not heard in this form since "Abraxas"."Gitano" is a rare
and inspired foray intop classic Mexican folk styles and lead
singer Greg Walker adds spice and vitality to the affair.Once you
have the first three albums of Santana THIS is the place to go!

No album from Santana could top or even match the musical perfection of their 1969-1971 period, but Amigos comes close. David Brown returns to play rock solid bass, and add the "Afro" back into Afro-cuban. Ndugu Chancler does a terrific job of playing drums and timbales at the same time. He's not as good as Michael Shrieve, but he did good nonetheless.
The album is really good, and it gets even better after each listen. Dance Sister Dance and Europa are the highlights of the album. Look Up (To See What's Coming Down) is a great song that resembles almost perfectly to the old Santana. Let Me is one of three "funk" flavored songs. This is actually not that bad of a song. It's actually pretty good if you listen to it a few times. Only one song in the whole album is bad, "Tell Me Are you Tired." This album could definetly do without it.
Overall, this album is the damn near closest you can get to the original Santana sound, only Abraxas Pool gets to the same level to the originals. Nevertheless, buy this album. You will not be dissappointed.

Santana has always had the amazing ability to change musical direction. Amigos is a musical experience that's radically different from the brilliant Welcome album and the very good comeback Supernatural.

Like other Santana albums in the 70s, Amigos combines a variety of musical styles--Latin, jazz fusion, disco, and funk. Unfortunately, the variety of musical styles makes the album challenging to listen to if heard in full. The songs do not mesh well together. While I appreciate the combination of various musical styles in one song, going from Latin-flavored "Gitano" to the funky "Tell Me Are You Tired" makes the album disjointed. In comparison, Welcome's tracks blend well together.

In my opinion, only one track truly stands out--"Dance Sister Dance", a classic eight minute epic that builds and builds in tempo and energy. The song is one of my favorites of Santana and thankfully is on some of the group's greatest hits albums.

A good second song of the album is "Take Me With You", whose first few seconds sound like background music to an episode of Arrested Development but like Dance Sister Dance is able to transition from Latin rock to a slow samba-like rhythm. Regrettably, most of the other songs on the album are less memorable and certainly not classics. The funky/choral "Let It Shine" and the discoish "Let Me" are repetitive and boring tracks, especially when compared to the brillance of Dance Sister Dance.

Overall, the album lacks the genius of Welcome, but is a OK pick for the true Santana fan.

This represents the final throes of Santana's creative streak before he all but ran out, and chronologically speaking it's also his last pure studio album that's any good. Obviously the best song is the classic guitar solo "Europa (Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile)", a melodic, gorgeous, tear-jerking guitar solo. It takes the ideas presented on "Samba Pa' Ti", waaaay back from Abraxas, and brings them to their logical extent. As usual, it's Santana's playing alone that saves a lot of these songs - his lengthy solo on "Dance Sister Dance" lifts it from a mediocre but harmless MOR tune to something almost spiritual. But please, forget about the crappy "song half", and focus instead on the guitar solo. I do prefer the live version on Moonflower, though, since it shortens the crappy "song half" and removes the synthesized gloss accompanying the solo. The remaining five songs are considerably harder to recommend, though. "Gitano" is enjoyable but overlong salsa in Santana's usual style. "Let Me" is funky, but thin from a compositional standpoint. "Take Me With You" is flashy, but unimpressive. And then there are the two really bad songs. "Tell Me You are Tired" is the kind of thing that Journey may have been doing around the same time, and "Shine it On" (chosen, for inexplicable reasons, as a single - thankfully, it wasn't too big of a hit, peaking out in the lower regions of the Top 100) is disco morass. But the two classics and maybe "Gitano" are enough to bump the rating up. It definitely foreshadows the bad directions Santana would later take his music in, but taken as itself it's pretty good.

Amigos came on the heels of some of Santana's most adventurous work. But by 1976, the musical climate was no longer conducive to the exploratory jazz-rock of Welcome and Borboletta; the twin pressures of disco and arena rock loomed over Santana, and the band moved toward airplay and a more commercial sound.

Tom Coster, Carlos and producer David Rubinson probably looked at the eclecticism, catchy melodies and punchy rhythms of Abraxas when creating Amigos [...]. "Take Me With You" is a slicked-up "Incident at Neshabur" and the much-praised "Europa" is a more professional (but less moving) guitar ballad in the mold of "Samba Pa Ti". These guys knew how to mimic a good formula! Other highlights are the Latin folk of "Gitano", the catchy "Dance Sister Dance" (nice jam at the end), and the funky "Tell Me Are You Tired". "Let It Shine", the band's blatant attempt to cash in on the disco craze, is conveniently placed at the end of the album. Overall, this is a very good album that doesn't take many chances but will please most Santana fans.