Santana heard someone bellow, 'It's curtains for you!' Luckily, it was just his oddly threatening tailor, describing his hideous new shirt.

Allow me to briefly indulge in some history: Santana, now the forename-excising moniker of Carlos Santana, was once the name of his family band, back in the 1950s. Sadly, of that group, Carlos is the only Santana brother still in the music industry. Percussionist/trombonist Tito "El Matador" Santana went on to have a moderately successful career in professional wrestling, before retiring in the mid-90s, and recently being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame. Meanwhile, insane bassist/xylophonist Tony Santana lives out his days doing sadly misguided Scarface impressions.

Ahem. Some real history: in the dying seconds of the 20th Century, Clive Davis and Carlos Santana stumbled upon a winning formula to reignite the guitarist's flagging career with the Supernatural album. To wit: get young, hip, attractive singers to sing pop music with occasional lashings of Santana's Latino guitar, and then sleep atop piles and piles of Pesos. Sadly, this rich vein of effortless - nay, lazy - hitmaking peaked with Rob Thomas singing "Smooth" on that very album, and then dried up, culminating in ugly, confusing efforts with the likes of shovel-faced Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger.

So, in need of a vaguely new direction, and presumably wary of scraping straight through the bottom of the Guest Singer Barrel, Santana has done what every rock musician fading into a blandly proficient senectitude does when they run out of ideas: a rock classics cover album. Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time. Except - oh no! - more guest singers. But - hooray! - some of them are quite high-profile and promising. But - oh no! - it's the guy out of Papa Roach singing Deep Purple.

Oh dear.

Skull cap. Medallion. Extravagant guitar strap. Tuxedo. Santana, you silly old man, you accessorise like a frenzied blind tweenage Incan.

I'll say this for Old Man Santana - he can play a mean guitar solo. No matter what else I might say in this review (and goodness knows I say lots of things), never dare to forget that Santana is quite fantastic at wibbling away with his PRS. It is, after all, what he's based a rather long career on. What he hasn't based that career on is doing interesting cover versions of classic songs with grungy singers who are mostly content to growl unconvincingly through their allotted song. No, he's not very familiar with that at all, and boy does it show.

It doesn't help that this, like all of his Arista albums, is quite plainly a pop album, intended for purchase in the Tesco charts section rather than a dark corner of the one remaining record shop in Western Europe. So there are no interesting reimaginings of these songs, no brilliant fusion of styles to create something new out of something old, no surprising detours. Just rote renditions of songs you've heard a million and four times already, overproduced to breaking point, possibly with slightly more guitar tomfoolery, and definitely with less inspired vocals.

Even Chris Cornell, who sings more like Robert Plant than Robert Plant does these days, sounds bored in his take on "Whole Lotta Love" (which, as every good Soundgarden fan knows, is the song he was always fated to sing). And - somewhat dispiritingly, I'm sure you'll agree - that's one of the better efforts. The rest of the album sounds about as natural as Jackie Stallone looks. This isn't Supernatural - this is unnatural.

Young Santana, or young Chris Cornell? Who knows? (I do. It's Santana. Obv.)

A huge problem here is matching singers with the right songs. If we're being honest with ourselves, does anyone expect Chris Daughtry to do a very good job covering Def Leppard's "Photograph"? You might expect Gavin Rossdale to sound a little less chemically sedated than he does, but you'd probably know better than to have him sing T. Rex's "Bang a Gong". It's something of an issue when one of the more successful collaborations involves Nas rapping and AC/DC song, and even that disintegrates terrfiyingly into Nas prattling on about how he and Santana are "homeboys", and - hopelessly - optimistically foresees the song being played in "the clubs". I would not hold my breath, Mr. Nas.

It's a wasted effort. For every mild success ("While My Guitar Gently Weeps" gets by on the strength of being a hard song to ruin, and Joe Cocker gives "Little Wing" a fair go of things), there's a horrible, crushing failure (Jacoby Shaddix doing "Smoke on the Water", or Chester Bennington "doing" "Riders on the Storm". My ears, my ears, what a world, etc). The whole project is weighted down with a feeling of sterility and pointlessness, and there's not a person alive who's going to choose these cover versions over the originals. Not even Tito or Tony.

Al Byrne