The Surgery Ship (2013)

It's an open secret that Sting's interest in songwriting waned after 2003's Sacred Love, an undistinguished collection of mature pop that passed with barely a ripple despite winning a Grammy for its Mary J. Blige duet "Whenever I Say Your Name." Sting spent the next decade wandering – writing classical albums for lute, recording the frostiest Christmas album in memory, rearranging his old hits for symphony, then finally, inevitably, reuniting the Police – before finding inspiration within the confines of a musical. The Last Ship tells the tale of a British shipyard in the '80s, one laid low by changing times, so there's naturally an elegiac undertow to Sting's originals, a sensibility underscored by his decision to ground nearly all these songs in the folk of the British Isles.

Since 2007's Precambrian, the Ocean has become increasingly conceptual. Two separate offerings from 2010, Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, had longtime fans in a quandary as to whether the band were visionaries or merely pretentious. Over two years in the making, Pelagial was originally envisaged by guitarist, lyricist, and band mastermind Robin Staps as a single piece of instrumental music that charted the seven levels of the sea - Epipelagic, Mesopelagic, Bathypelagic, Abyssopelagic, Hadopelagic, Demersal, and Benthic - by portraying their depths musically, from the surface where light enters (Epipelagic) to the murky, enclosed-in-darkness ocean floor (Benthic) where bottom feeders live…

Composed by longtime J.J. Abrams collaborator Michael Giacchino, who also composed the music for series like Alias, Lost, and Fringe, as well as the previous installment of the rebooted Star Trek, the score to Star Trek: Into Darkness follows the re-imagined franchise out of the realm of sci-fi and into the world of action. Filled with tension and urgency, Giacchino's huge score builds a kind of tension and urgency that feels right at home in this new Trek universe, playing to the film's strength as a thrill-a-minute action adventure and making for a fine analogue to its original series predecessor, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Definitely worth a listen for Star Trek fans, especially those willing to accept this new take on the Trek universe with open arms (and ears).