Santana: "Supernatural"

Delivering good—albeit repetitive—Latin vibes, one shroom-induced solo at a time.

There’s no doubt about it: Carlos Santana is probably one of the more talented and widely known great guitarists of all time. Unless you have lived under a rock with cotton in your ears for the past 60 years, then chances are you’ve heard something with the Mexican artist playing his guitar. He has a knack for throwing solo-like melodies over the top of every song he’s in and blending them nicely into the music. Of course, he also gets his spotlight with true solos here and there—where he can really show off his talent. He is certainly the best Latin guitarist that I’ve ever heard in my time.

The juggernaut album Supernatural is probably also his best known, having won nine Grammies (no, seriously—NINE) in the year 2000, one year after it was made. And I’d say I have to agree with the committee that issues Grammies… for the most part. This album is certainly spectacular in its own way, and that’s not simply from the seemingly substance abuse-inspired solos that Santana cranks out throughout the album. The music is just well written, and the sound engineering is also masterfully done. There are so many different sounds and facets of music going on at once that every song sounds grand in its own way. The layering is exceptionally well done; hearing ten different instruments at the same time clearly is a feat in and of itself. The whole damn thing just sounds really good.

You're darn right I won 8
grammies for this album.

By no means is this a perfect album, however. There are a couple major flaws here, but those might even be debatable in and of themselves with a little explanation. The first is that I couldn’t get over the marring fact that a lot of this album sounds exactly the same. It’s not as glaringly bad as some metal bands out there that shamelessly create an entire album by recycling the same “chuggity-chug-chug, garbled vocals” riff over and over for an hour, but it is very noticeable. And it all comes down to the fact that the majority of the songs are written in the key of A minor. Seriously, I think that over half of the album is written in A minor. Does this degrade the quality of the songs? No, but it can become rather bland if one were to listen to the album all the way through (which is exactly what I am doing). Maybe this comes from the fact that we are talking about Latin music here, since I’ve noticed that Latin music is commonly in that key, but still—there is more to life than A minor. However, one could argue that it gives the album more of a “jam” feel, given that Santana seems to do just that in a lot of the songs. And that might be a valid point, but the fact of the matter is that it does get a touch bit old.

Which leads me to my next nitpick: most of the actual Latin songs on Supernatural sound like you could take them and string them all into one giant song. Here again, we run into the gray area of “Is this a flaw or just the nature and style of the genre?”, and I would have to lean slightly more towards the latter of that question. It’s not too bad… it’s just noticeable. But quite frankly, I would definitely file this statement into severe nitpicking and more or less disregard it since 99.9% of people will not notice such a minor detail.

Santana does do something pretty cool on this album by bringing in a large array of guest artists to contribute to the music, and I would say that the majority of his selection is a good addition. Eric Clapton jams with Santana on the final track, and Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 leads the vocals in the smash hit “Smooth”. Both of those songs—and others—create a diverse yet fluid and enjoyable sound for the listener to enjoy.

Oh, c'mon! I know they're not that good
but I'm too busy being awesome to sing...

However, there are a couple songs that made me raise my eyebrow at the vocal contributions. Some of the worst on the album are the hip-hop/rap/R&B artists that he brings into the mix; they honestly just take away from the experience of the album as a whole. This is not bias against those genres: this is pointing out that those specific artists are just not that good on their respective songs. One example that I will actually point out here is the song “Do You Like The Way” featuring Lauryn Hill and—no kidding—our good buddy Cee-Lo. Frankly, the song is terrible—not only because these two clowns take their loosely rhythmic styles and try to fuse them with a very solidly rhythmic genre but also because Santana takes a back seat for most of the song. Excuse me? What happened to the lovely, shroom-induced solos and melodic riffing we heard earlier? Now all we’ve got are two mediocre R&B artists trying to force Latin music to have no rhythm. Not a good plan.

You may have gotten to this point and are thinking, “Man, he really doesn’t like this album at all.” On the contrary, dear reader: the reason I can go into such detail about the flaws is because there are so FEW of them. This is why they stick out to me so much—the overwhelming majority of the album is so good that these little nitpicks are accidentally emphasized. Honestly, after going through the album a couple times I found myself really getting into the music. There are a couple songs that I have to point out for being my favorites. The first is the opener “(Da Le) Yaleo”; it’s delightful, fun, and an excellent mood setter for the album. Instead of carrying the song as it might do at times, Santana’s guitar squealing is just along for the ride and provides a great accompaniment to the energy in the track. But my favorite song has to be “Migra”, a track nestled in the middle of the album. It’s energetic, it’s funky, it’s tribal—it’s downright enjoyable. It’s tracks like these two that just add to the overall greatness that is Supernatural.

So what's the verdict, then? Well, it was a tough choice but, after a few listens and some thought, Santana's Supernatural deserves a solid:

5 out of 7. Not bad at all, Santana.