Lakeshore Records releases Jeff Russo's original music for the second season of Star Trek: Discovery. The second season finds the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery joining forces with Captain Christopher Pike on a new mission to investigate seven mysterious red signals and the appearance of an unknown being called the Red Angel. While the crew must work together to unravel their meaning and origin, Michael Burn-ham is forced to face her past with the return of her estranged brother, Spock...

Jeff Russo delivers more of the same with his score for the second season of Star Trek: Discovery. Unlike Season One, where fans were treated to two albums (Chapter 1 and 2) it would appear that someone at Lakeshore Records has realised that, to be perfectly honest, there's not enough interesting music to warrant issuing two separate CD releases.

The problem with the music here is that it's so far removed from all of the previous Star Trek franchises that it just feels oddly out of place. All of the movie scores still stand the test of time, as do the scores for the previous Trek shows. But Discovery, while being fantastic television is, to my mind, lacking in the music department. It's all about power themes and atmospheric cues to heighten the tension of the onscreen action. And that's great... but after more than a decade of being bombarded with epic superhero themes it would be interesting to have something a little more memorable.

Tracks like 'Flashback' and 'Cathedral' show a more melancholic side to Russo's compositional style, but as Trek is a show where we engage with the characters on an emotional level, I was surprised that there weren't more emotive themes.

Even the show's main theme is a little on the bland side and the overuse of referencing both that as well as Alexander Courage's theme from The Original Series starts to lose its impact fairly quickly.

Of the score's 39 tracks (1 hr, 39 min, 17 sec) there wasn't much that reminded me of anything else, which you could argue is one of its strong points. 'Lost Communication' has a segment that reminded me of Mike Vickers's music for Warlords of Atlantis (1978). And, at a push, 'Stuck' has elements of Jerry Goldsmith's work for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

The show is great, and the music is a huge part of that, but it just doesn't work quite so well outside of the series.

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Darren Rea