Shape Shifter

| Santana

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Shape Shifter

Shape Shifter is the twenty-second studio album (thirty-sixth album overall) by Santana. It was released on May 14, 2012. This album is the first from his new record label Starfaith Records,[5] which is distributed by Sony Music Entertainment, owners of most of Santana's albums (except those recorded for Polydor Records which are owned by Universal Music Group). It is also the first album since 1992's Milagro that does not feature guest singers in any of the songs, a style that characterized Santana's albums since Supernatural. The album contains only one song with vocals ("Eres La Luz"). The track "Mr. Szabo" is a homage to the Hungarian guitarist Gábor Szabó, who released a series of 8 albums for Impulse Recordsbetween 1966 and 1967, and one of Carlos Santana's early idols, and features a similar rhythmical and harmonic structure to "Gypsy Queen", a Szabó hit from 1966 covered by Santana in 1970 as a medley with Fleetwood Mac's "Black Magic Woman".-Wikipedia

Critic Reviews

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  • All About Jazz

    July 17, 2012. Shape Shifter may not be a full-fledged return to the classic Santana sound, but it is the first recording in over a decade that harks back to the band's glory days and is a welcome respite from Santana "the pop star."  

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  • Blues Rock Review

    May 15, 2012. Shape Shifter is a very large, very ambitious project, and Santana’s wealth of experience shows itself worthwhile as he pushes out into ever new territory. As Santana’s music shape shifts, so do the boundaries in modern rock.  

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  • The Pier

    May 21, 2012. The true definition of a great musical masterpiece is when no song stands alone. If one song was excluded or left alone, perhaps the flow would not appear as smooth. And, with Santana’s guitar, the journey remained sincerely smooth, polished and precise, one track after another.  

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  • The Seattle Times

    May 15, 2012. If you’ve been yearning for some classic Carlos Santana, “Shape Shifter,” the guitarist’s first album on his new Starfaith Records label, is just the ticket. 

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  • AllMusic

    Its lack of more compelling compositional ideas and ham-fisted production problems are balanced by the fact that Santana is not coasting on his rep; he's trying to play the hell out of the guitar again. While ambition and reality are different things, any step away from the music of last decade would be an improvement -- and Shape Shifter delivers that.  

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  • Rolling Stone

    June 4, 2012. . . . the arrangements, oversweetened with too many synthesizers, lean toward lite jazz. Maybe fellow Latin-rock visionaries the Mars Volta could sign on for Volume Two?  

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  • PopMatters

    June 26, 2012. In spite of its title, Carlos and company don't really do a lot of shape-shifting on this roundly insipid record. It's depressing that Santana, an artist who is so clearly capable of creating frenetic, passionate - sexy even - music, has produced something so soullessly inert.  

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  • Guitar-Muse.com

    July 16, 2012. Shape Shifter doesn’t break any new ground and won’t retain the fans that came late to the party to hear duets with contemporary pop artists, but old school followers will appreciate Santana’s return to a style of music that made him a guitar icon. 

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  • AVHub

    There’s a timelessness to the album, which could have been released any time since the mid-80s, and one could easily imagine it having late-night international appeal, or soundtracking a hundred sequences in popular cinema. In any case, the man’s muse proves as robustly unpredictable as ever. 

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  • American Songwriter

    May 23, 2012. The veteran guitarist’s 36th album is a predominantly instrumental set that tries too hard to do too much over its hour long length.  

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  • The Independent

    May 12, 2012. While applauding Carlos Santana's dedication of Shape Shifter to native peoples everywhere, it might have been hoped that the album itself were more impressive. 

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  • wordsaboutmusic

    June 1, 2012. Shape Shifter is a welcome departure – oddly a departure back into what Santana does best: jamming over the top of jazz inflected funk and world-music (largely Afro-Cuban) grooves. Only one of the 13 tracks is a vocal, so Carlos is free to blow – rather than inject blues-style call-and-response lines in between Rob Thomas’s crooning – and blow he does. 

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  • Louder

    May 23, 2012. That Carlos Santana is a guitar maestro is beyond doubt. But at 57’ 29”, Shape Shifter is an awfully long solo.  

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  • HiFi.nl

    June 4, 2012. The almost entirely instrumental album (there is only singing on Eres La Luz, soaked in Latin American influences ) lives through the strings of the older man. And most fans will only be happy about that. 

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  • laut.de

    May 11, 2012. Predictable and formulaic as a rehearsed shortpass game.  

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  • Express

    May 13, 2012. There are some lovely, if dated, tunes lurking in tracks like Metatron, and the sort of chopped keyboard-playing that disappeared circa 1973, but long-time fans will yearn for the space and dynamics of his earliest albums.  

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  • NZ Herald

    May 18, 2012. So it is both poignant and spiritual in scope, though Metatron, a kind of Touch the Wind rip-off, might be intended to sound uplifting but it just sounds over-the-top cheesy. And there are other overwrought and ultimately weak moments . . . .  

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  • Wilson & Alroy's Record Reviews

    No revelations to be found, and a fair amount of tepid fluff ("Never The Same Again"), but at least it's not a pop singer parade, and it's heartening to hear Carlos tear through slow burners like "Nomad." Son Salvador plays piano on two numbers; I'm not sure who the other musicians are. (DBW)  

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  • Record Collector Magazine

    The good news is that Carlos himself shows little sign of reining in his signature excitability throughout Shape Shifter, an instrumental undertaking – with the exception of Eres La Luz, a pleasingly mechanistic Latin smoulder featuring vocalists Tony Lindsay and Andy Vargas.  

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  • bb3blog

    March 10, 2015. Santana’s latest album, Shape Shifters, brings back the classic Carlos we knew all too well. Don’t expect lots of pyrotechnic playing here (though there are some moments) – it’s just the man letting his guitar sing to your soul. 

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  • The Bolton News

    May 13, 2012. Overall, as you would expect, we are listening to a master-class in guitar playing as given by Carlos Santana, but such is his skill and the feeling he puts into it – we don’t mind one little bit. 

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  • The Great Albums

    Completely reverting back to the band’s roots, this disc is both entirely celebrity-guest-free and almost thoroughly instrumental. . . . . It’s not a complete return to form, but it’s their best disc since Shaman, and fans of the band’s early work should find a lot to like here.  

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