The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2002)

Like clinging to the neck of a runaway horse. Shore's score to the second installment of Peter Jackson's epic Tolkien adaptation, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, is a massive undertaking that weaves offbeat instrumentation (a Norwegian hardanger, a North African rhaita), massed choruses, and Enya-esque soloists into a sonically unrelenting whole. The liner notes call it a ''classical orchestral piece in the European tradition,'' but that's bunk -- this is Hollywood, and gloriously so.