• AllMyVinyl #11
• Band: Santana
• Album Title: Africa Speaks
• Release Date: 7 Jun 2019
• Date purchased: 25 Sep 2023
• Location purchased: Half Price Books
• Color of vinyl: black
• Number of discs: 2
• Links: [ Wikipedia | Discogs | Band Website | Complete album on Youtube ]

Before I talk about the album itself, I wanted to talk about how I got it.  Since I got back into vinyl and we got past the worst of covid, and people started venturing out in the world again…  I would go by Half Price Books and look through their vinyl.  More often than not there’s nothing there that interests you.  Sometimes you find something that makes you go “oh yeah, I know that” but you decline.  Then this day (25 Sep 2023) I saw something interesting.  Was a stack of Santana albums on vinyl.  All new.  All sealed.  Looked it up on my phone, it was a Santana album I knew nothing about.  I hadn’t heard of Africa Speaks before.  Was (c) 2019, so I jumped on it.  If you look at my picture it was $14.99 new, and they had a dozen or so of them – all sealed.  My guess is some record store didn’t sell them, so they unloaded ’em on Half Price Books.  I thought it was a steal for a double vinyl, new and sealed.  So I bought it home, as I’d liked several of the recent Santana albums going back to the massive one from 1999, “Supernatural”.

But basically what I got wasn’t an album like that.  Oh, it was good. It’s Carlos Santana, so it’s gonna have some good guitar work on it.  But this wasn’t an album like Supernatural (or the couple that came after it).  Those albums were radically different styles of music all mashed together with Santana weaving them all together.  That was due to many guest vocalists and players.  This one is more a cohesive soundscape.  It doesn’t sound like an “album of songs”, it sounds like one continuous piece of music.  Oh, there’s songs here, it’s not like it is one single song spread out over four sides of an album.  But it doesn’t feel like different things on an album.  To that, I have a very hard time naming individual songs here, when I listen to one song, I’m listening to the entire album, and even when taking notes today listening to it, I had to get Shazam out and tell me what the heck song I was listening to.

That is in no way saying I disliked it.  I quote loved it, because as I said – it’s Carlos Santana.  Love his guitar work, and this album contains another heaping good pile of it.  But this write up won’t gush over one or two songs, and then go “Yeah, there’s some other stuff”.  I kind of view this as one piece, and if you like Carlos Santana, you’ll like this.  If you don’t, well, you probably won’t.  Kind of as simple as that.

Now, having said that..  There are a few bits I thought I should point out.  The first song on the album has a bit of a non Santana vibe.  I mean it’s got some of that distinct Santana guitar sound, but the song itself had a different sound leading off the album.  I thought the tracks Batonga & Los Invisibles had great beats that ran through the whole song.  But as I said before, the remainder of the songs are like one big sonic wall with Carlos Santana standing on top of it, and that’s a good thing.

When I was reading about this album earlier today I discovered it was recorded in an amazingly short amount of time.  The entire album was recorded in 10 days, which itself is a short period of time for sure.  But then when realize they recorded a total of FOURTY NINE SONGS in those ten days..  Holy crap was that prolific.  I mean that’s an average of basically 5 full songs recorded and completed in a day.  Now I’m no musician, but I have to imagine that’s out there in terms of speed.  An interesting point there.  The released album has 11 songs on it, and there were two others on retailer/regional exclusive versions, so that’s 13.  What happened to the other 36 songs?  That’s not like or or two or even half a dozen, but.. THIRTY SIX?  That’s a LOT of extra music.

Oh, and one last thing.  The album was produced by Rick Rubin.  It still sounds like a Santana album. :)